The Cactus project is pleased to announce the release of version 1.5-beta1
Cactus is a unit testing framework for testing server side java code.

Goals
-----

The main focus for version 1.5-beta1 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-beta1 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:
* 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)
* 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-beta1. 

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

* Support for WebLogic 6.x and 7.x has not been tested.
* [Bug 21484] ClassCastException when casting WebAppRequestDispatcher  
* [Bug 21237] CactifyWarTask duplicates init-param lines in existing 
  web.xml servlet tag  
* [Bug 17933] FormAuthentication assumes "localhost" when adding cookies  
* [Bug 17077] Code page problems under WebSphere z/OS  
* [Bug 17653] result is null in AbstractWebTestCaller's doGetResults() 
  method. Note that this bug is probably due to a race condition problem 
  that happens very unfrequently and which is not yet resolved. It will be 
  solved in an upcoming point release.
* 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-beta1 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