The Cactus project is pleased to announce the release of version 1.5
Cactus is a unit testing framework for testing server side java code.

Goals
-----

The main focus for version 1.5 was on usability. We had several user
requests to make Cactus easier to get started with. The web site has
been overhauled to provide better doc navigation and contains several
new tutorials. In addition, several new front
ends for Cactus have been added: Ant integration, Maven integration
Jetty integration, and an experimental Eclipse plugin.

It should be noted that the Eclipse plugin for Cactus is not part of
Cactus 1.5 as it is still experimental. It is available in Cactus 
nightly build area (http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/downloads.html). 
Your feedback is important to make it production ready. If you're an 
Eclipse user, make sure you try it (it is documented on 
http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/integration/eclipse/index.html).

Main new features
-----------------

The following main features have been added since Cactus 1.4.1:
* Added support for begin()/end() that are run before and after each
  test on the client side (mirrors setUp()/tearDown() which are run
  before and after each test on the server side).
* Special Jetty integration to automatically start Jetty when executing
  a test suite
* Added support for Form-based authentication
* Added support for i8n
* Added new JspTagLifecycle class to help unit test taglibs
* Added support for JBoss in Ant integration
* Added support for server-side XSLT when running Cactus tests from a 
  browser
* New Ant integration (<cactifywar> and <cactus> Ant tasks). Note that
  version 1.5-rc1 has added support for WebLogic 7.x as compared to
  version 1.5-beta1.
* Added ability to run pure JUnit tests seamlessly on the server side
* Lots of other new features. For a full feature list, see
  http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/features.html

Changes
-------

Please check the Changes page at
http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/changes.html for a full list of the 
changes in version 1.5 compared to previous versions.

Known limitations and bugs:
---------------------------

* Support for WebLogic 6.x has not been tested. This is because BEA is
  no longer providing a download for WebLogic 6.x (unless you're a BEA
  customer).
* [Bug 21484] "ClassCastException when casting WebAppRequestDispatcher"
* [Bug 23978] "Cactus doesn't properly integrate w/HttpUnit. External 
  Javascript generates NullPointerException". Cactus integration with
  HttpUnit needs to be improved to support parsing of Javascript contained
  in returned pages.
* [Bug 17077] "Code page problems under WebSphere z/OS".
* [Bug 21237] "CactifyWarTask duplicates init-param lines in existing 
  web.xml servlet tag".
* [Bug 23653] "CactifyWar task throws OutOfMemory Error with large WAR file".
* [Bug 23854] "Clustered servlet test results are not accurately reported".
* [Bug 17933] "FormAuthentication assumes "localhost" when adding cookies".
* [Bug 24054] "Sometimes, JBoss is stopped before it has finished starting".
* [Bug 24842] "java.lang.NullPointerException in first test -- thread 
  synchronization prob?". This bug has not been confirmed yet.
* [Bug 24851] "Ant <cactus><tomcat4x> task does not function correctly with 
  datasource definitions". This bug has not been confirmed yet.
* Some binary incompatiblity was introduced by the refactoring of the
  XXXTestCase class hierarchy. Whereas it was previously inheriting from 
  AbstractWebTestCase and AbstractTestCase, it is now simply inheriting
  from JUnit TestCase. Thus all non-public API are now not visible from 
  users (as they should be). If you had some framework compiled with 
  Cactus 1.4.1 and using some methods from AbstractWebTestCase or 
  AbstractTestCase, you'll need to recompile it with Cactus 1.5 or 
  you might get a NoClassDefFoundError exception. We'll be more careful in 
  the future.

For more information about Cactus, please visit
http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/.

Have fun,
-The Cactus team