17.9. Summary

The persistence layer is undoubtedly one of the most important parts of any enterprise application, although testing it can be a challenge: test cases must be agile, but database characteristics make them bureaucratic. Although JUnit itself doesn’t have an answer to this problem, many tools do. In this chapter, we used DbUnit to validate an application’s database access.

DbUnit is a stable and mature project, comprising a few dozen interfaces, implementations, and helpers. Despite this high number of classes, DbUnit usage is relatively simple, because it consists of setting up the database before a test is run and comparing its state afterwards.