About a month ago, I announced a new project, FacesTester, a JUnit-based testing tool for JSF that my good friend Rod Coffin and I have undertaken. Since then, Rod posted a very nice introduction to FacesTester usage. Today, we made our first official release, FacesTester 0.1. The version number should indicate that it’s still a work in progress, but it is already quite functional (I, for one, have been using it to build a test suite for Mojarra Scales, which has helped drive out features and resolve bugs very quickly). We wanted to push out a release to encourage people to download it, use it, and give us feedback.

So what does FacesTester currently support? Quite a bit. In this entry, we’ll take a quick look at what FacesTester offers, and what we have planned.

Without diving into code too much, which Rod has covered nicely, here’s a quick list of what we support:

• Requesting a page from your JSF app
• Verifying the existence of a component in the UIComponent tree of a rendered page
• Verifying the existence of arbitrary substrings in the rendered page
• Exercising managed beans via EL on a requested page
• Exercising custom components via a requested page
• Acquiring a handle (FacesForm) for a form on a rendered page
• Manipulating form values and submitting the form
• Validating managed-bean declarations in faces-config.xml
• Validating custom component declarations in faces-config.xml

While that is, I think, a pretty nice set of features, we have more work planned. For example, the faces-config.xml static analysis will eventually cover as many of the valid configuration elements as possible (e.g., Renderer declarations, navigation cases, PhaseListeners, etc); we currently do not support query string parameters, which I’ll be fixing shortly; and so on.

If you’re a JSF developer, we’d love for you try this out and tell us what works, what doesn’t, and what you’d like to see. The project is hosted on kenai.com, where we have forums and, most importantly, an issue tracker. You can download the jar file directly from the Kenai project site, or, if you’re a Maven user, the jar is available from the java.net Maven 2 repository:

        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.steeplesoft.jsf</groupId>
            <artifactId>facestester</artifactId>
            <version>0.1</version>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>

Any and all feedback is welcome!

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