Getting started with Arquillian and TomEE

Arquillian is a testing framework on top of JUnit (or TestNG if you prefer). It makes it easier to do integration tests in a managed environment (JEE environment here after).

We provide an embedded and remote adapter, see the available adapters for more details.

In a managed environment it is usually quite difficult to perform unit tests, due to the fact that most of the time you have to mock almost the entire environment. It is very time consuming and requires complicated integration tests that must reflect the production environment as best as possible. Unit tests lose their true value.

JEE always got seen as an heavy technology, impossible to test and to use in development. OpenEJB always fought against that idea and proved that it’s really possible.

As David Blevins said:

With latest Java EE specifications (5 and especially 6), it becomes a reality. Arquillian typically addresses that area. It is basically a framework that aims at helping/managing the server/container in an agnostic way. Arquillian is responsible for the lifecycle of the container (start, deploy, undeploy, stop, etc).

TomEE community heavily invested on that framework to prove it’s really useful and can really help testing Java EE application. That’s also an opportunity to get the most out of TomEE (lightweight, fast, feature-rich, etc).