Java Testing and Design: From Unit Testing to Automated Web Tests [Paperback]

Frank Cohen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 16, 2004

This is a supremely useful book for software developers working on Java and J2EE-based Web-enabled applications, including Web Services. Frank Cohen is the "go-to" guy for enterprises needing to design, build, and test complex information systems. The author helps you go beyond learning the language to understand how design choices impact scalability, functionality, and performance. Your application might run perfectly in the lab, but it crashes in production. Or, you might already know Java, but you don't understand why your application runs so slowly. If that is the case, then this book will help you better understand your application and optimize it for maximum performance.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

This book shows how to understand what application you want to write, what strategies are likely to get you there, and then how to measure your level of success. This book offers practical, concrete advice about how to stay in tune with your project and ensure that your products are at least as good as your plans.—Phil Goodwin, Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems.

Produce scalable, reliable, high-performance Web-enabled applications in Java

Web infrastructure is everywhere. And yet until this book there was no guide to show how your choices in design, coding, and testing impact the scalability, performance, and functionality of your Web-enabled applications.

Java Testing and Design: From Unit Testing to Automated Web Tests teaches you a fast and efficient method to build production-worthy, scalable, and well performing Web-enabled applications. The techniques, methodology, and tools presented in this book will enable developers, QA technicians, and IT managers to work together to achieve unprecedented productivity in development and test automation.

With Java Testing and Design, you will be prepared for a laundry list of new APIs, protocols, and tools being packed into the next generation of J2EE, .NET, and open-source systems. While these new software libraries, tools, and techniques are a big move forward for all of us, they push us to learn even more technology to turn out complex, highly functional, and interoperable software applications.

Author Frank Cohen shares proven best practices based on his extensive experience at leading enterprises (General Motors, BEA, AMP, 2Wire, Elsevier, U.S. Navy, Sun) and delivers an immediately useful set of open-source tools, techniques, and code that will automate the testing of your Web-enabled applications.

Coverage includes:

• Software development and test automation methodologies
• Exposes the scalability problems in SOAP-based Web Services
• Building, testing, and monitoring integrated multiple-protocol Web-enabled applications
• Performance kits for developers using BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, and Sun Java System (formerly Sun ONE)
• Architecture, code, and test agents for J2EE, Web Services, P2P, and .NET
• Secure Internet services using current and next-generation technologies and much more!

About the Author

FRANK COHEN is the "go to" guy when enterprises need to understand and solve problems in complex interoperating information systems, especially Web Services. Frank is Founder of PushToTest, a test automation solutions business, and maintainer of the popular TestMaker open-source project. For the past 25 years he has led some of the software industry's most successful products, including Norton Utilities for the Macintosh, Stacker, and SoftWindows.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR (March 16, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0131421891
• ISBN-13: 978-0131421899
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,621,919 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some good information, but..., July 1, 2004

By 

Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Java Testing and Design: From Unit Testing to Automated Web Tests (Paperback)

I recently received a review copy of Java Testing And Design - From Unit Testing To Automated Web Tests by Frank Cohen (Prentice Hall). While there is some good information to be gleaned from the book, there were a few things that got in the way.

The chapter layout: The Forces at Work Affecting Your Web-Enabled Software; When Application Performance Becomes A Problem; Modeling Tests; Java Development and Test Automation Tools; Bridging from Methodology to Design; Design and Test in HTTP/HTML Environments; Tuning SOAP and XML Web Services; State, Design, and Testing; Integrating with .NET Web Services; Building and Testing Intranets and Secure Environments; A Web Application Framework from Construction to Test; Turning Test Agent Results into Actionable Knowledge; Concurrency and Scalability in a High-Volume Datacenter; Making the Right Choices for SOAP Scalability; Multiprotocol Testing in an Email Environment; Index

When I first requested the book, I was thinking it would help me to understand how to adequately test my Java programs using software like JUnit and such. Throw in some methodology and best practices, and I was ready to go. To be fair, the author does cover the topics of testing quite throughly, and especially testing of web-based HTTP applications. If you're not looking for software how-to or detailed discussion of many different products, then you'll benefit from the book.

Where I had problems is that most of the technical parts of the book involve showing the reader how to use an open source package that he wrote called TestMaker by PushToTest. There is, in my view, too much "using the software that we wrote" material. All the code uses JavaDoc comments that show the particular PushToTest developer who wrote the code. Before too long, I felt as if I was in a 500 page infomercial for TestMaker. The software might well be excellent, but I felt somewhat lead astray in that I felt as if I was being pushed towards TestMaker rather than towards a variety of tools that one could use. I would have felt better about the whole thing had the title been "Java Testing And Design Using TestMaker".

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lot of controvery here, this is an awesome book!, July 14, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Java Testing and Design: From Unit Testing to Automated Web Tests (Paperback)

Boy! For a book on testing for geeks the reader reviews show there's some controvery here.

Ok, so here is what I loved about this book: It shows the geeks a way to deliver SOA (meaning J2EE apps, .NET apps, Web sites, Web Services, Web applications, and anything else that uses a network) that runs 24x7 and won't fall over when a lot of users show up all at once.

The book's central argument is that businesses operating SOA need to have the cooperation of coders, QA, and network managers to really be successful.

So do I recommend this book to a hard core J2EE engineer? Yes, because the QA geek that tests the J2EE engineer's code doesn't code in Java. They need something just as powerful but not as complex as Java. The book gives us a dozen reasons why the Jython scripting language is an ideal medium between the J2EE engineer and the QA geek. For example, the unit tests the J2EE engineer writes can be reused as scalability and load tests by QA. The same goes for network managers who use the unit tests as service monitors. All that has been missing is a common framework coders and QA can use! Very cool stuff.

Why else did I like this book... Because after reading the book my boss finally understands why testing is important for the services we are deploying. He uses this book to explain to his bosses how we should be going about testing our services: The book says everything should be tested against the user's goals and it shows how to do it. That's awesome!

I very much liked that all of the example scenarios presented in the book come with real, live, working test code. And if I'm not happy with using TestMaker (which is free! duh!) I can take the examples to any of the other test utilities out there.

Java Testing and Design is an awesome book.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars This book disappointed me , June 11, 2004

By 

Anshuman Purohit (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Java Testing and Design: From Unit Testing to Automated Web Tests (Paperback)

The complexity of Java technology compounds the challenges associated with web-based applications testing. That's why I was excited when I noticed this book. However, the book disappointed me once I read it.

The complexity of Java technology compounds the challenges associated with web-based applications testing. That's why I was excited when I noticed this book. However, the book disappointed me once I read it.

The Name
The first disappointment was the book's title. The first word of the title is "Java," but the author avoids showing any Java code. The closest he gets to Java is Jython, a scripting language implemented in Java. If you are designing or testing performant Java applications, you will be better off reading Enterprise Java Performance by Steve L. Halter and Steven J. Munroe, also from Prentice Hall. If I were to name this book, I'd call it "Testing Webservices with TestMaker & Jython."

Topic Organization
This book is a collection of very wordy, unclear, and unrelated notes. The diary-like organization of topics, left me wondering, "where is the meat." Repetition of subject matter, unfocused discussion and abrupt transition of topics will bound to make you lose your attention. Examples don't build upon one another. If you are very dedicated and focused, you are left with tons of irrelevant text to skim through to derive any real value. Some ancillary topics could have been better located in an appendix. A list of acronyms or glossary of terms would be nice.
You will notice frequent typo/errors in this book.

Vague Notions
While building the context to promote TestMaker and "intelligent agent" as the be all and end all of Software Engineering (Part I, about 200 pages), the book cared less to define the term itself. TestMaker is a free, open-source tool for unit testing, load testing, and system monitoring developed by the book's author.

Target Audience
Contrary to a few comments about this book, this book provides little value to Java developers. However, Web Rubrics (an objective performance grading matrix), User Archetype (a Prototypical User, modeling user behavior and habit. Is an extension of UML Actor), WAPS (Web-enabled Application Points System - A matrix to measure software quality based on functionality, performance and scalability) and The Micromax Lifecycle (many small improvement to software application and techniques to categorize and prioritize micro-tasks) might be of interest to "QA technicians" and "IT Managers."

Reference/Textbook
I normally look for two qualities to assess a book. First, does the book cover a generic ground in sufficient depth to serve as a reference? Poor organization and shallow coverage of concepts doesn't put this book on my reference bookshelf. Secondly, I look for hands-on examples that can serve as a tutorial for the reader. This book doesn't provide a single line of Java code.

To summarize, I do not recommend this book for Java developers interested in learning more about Java testing and design.