Read almost any software developer journal or website and we're told that responsible developers write test cases. If those developers are Java developers then, most likely, they use JUnit for those test cases. JUnit is probably the oldest and certainly the most popular Java-based testing framework around. Created by Erich Gamma and Kent Beck, JUnit has become the de facto standard for unit testing. In the interim, however, other frameworks have been built to address various faults and deficiencies with JUnit.

One such option is JTiger written by Tony Morris. JTiger is a JDK 1.5 annotation based testing framework that leverages many of the new features that JDK 1.5 introduced. Another option is TestNG by Cedric Beust and Alexandru Popescu. Both offer some new features over JUnit 3.x, but as we'll see at the end of this article, the forthcoming version 4 of JUnit will include many of these new features.

Author: Justin Lee
Published: TheServerSide, July 2005