Customer Reviews

Swing Extreme Testing: The Extreme approach to complete Java application testing

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Yes, you can! Yes, you can test almost any aspect of your application and - provided you do have the tools - with relative ease. And the authors encourage you to actually do it. And they help you doing it with plenty of source code. Their "cyborg" an improved wrapper to java.awt.Robot is just great and of immediate use. I must admit that I immediately applied the thread testing chapter ideas (and some of the books helper code) to this suspicious part of my software: great relief. Since reading the landmark Java Concurrency in Practice, I am a little paranoid on that topic.

So who is the target audience?
At the core is the experienced Java developer not the quality control people or the managers. You should not only know Java quite well, you should also know a little about testing. Test Driven Development: By Example (Addison-Wesley Signature Series)is a good start.
Also it improves your benefits, if your projects are similar to the authors: Java rich client applications, distributed, RMI as communications protocol, databases of small size, artificial intelligence application and an agile development culture. For example if you do libraries and use a lot of classes, which are only visible in the package (quite sensible to do in this case) GrandTestAuto the special testing program of the authors will not be able to unit test your classes. Similar things hold for web or embedded or large database development.
Anyhow everything is supplied with source code. You can adapt it to your needs. Also the ideas are more important than the specific support tool implementations.

There is no reference section. The references are all distributed in the main text.

In summary I do recommend the book. It teaches you a lot and the reading is just plain fun. The book really draws you in.

The challenge for developers with swing though is testing its components. Testing is one of the fundamental steps in application development and apparently, testing Swing has become a challenge for developers. By itself swing is very easy to test but since it is used as an emulator, it is often changed according to the needs of the application. Changes in the application are common during the development process and swing has to adjust to these changes - eventually testing its components a little bit harder.

This book aims to answer those questions and guide the developers on properly testing the Swing plug-ins in as little time as possible. This book will deal with a very important testing technique: automation. Through automation, testing will be faster and development will eventually be easier.

The book has only 300 pages but divided into a whooping 20 chapters. Expect information packed chapters right from the start. The authors have practically squeezed all possible information with regards to testing and eventually in testing in Swing.

Clearly this book is not for beginners of Java. The language is extensively discussed in this book but as integration for Swing. Developers of Swing should find this book extremely helpful because the book just does not discuss the Swing testing in theory but also in practice. There are a lot of source codes in this book that could be used by developers as a reference to build an interesting testing tool for their plug in. This book is practically a gateway for developers in building complicated applications using Java and Swing.

Swing Extreme Testing proves that there is an aggressive approach in testing Swing as a plug-in for Java applications. Don't be fooled by Swing's GUI since without the knowledge of the actual coding of the components of the GUI, you will be lost right at the start. This book will try to explain the source code associated with Swing and how to build tools that could test Swing and push the capacity of the plug-in. Although it might warrant a little bit more explanation, this book should be more than enough for a developer who understands Swing and the components that comes with it in order to build an efficient application.