Comments: HttpUnit Cost/Benefit?

I think it pays off, since HttpUnit is so easy to use, i.e. the cost is low. The support is also stellar on the SourceForge mailing lists.

Posted by Mats Henricson at September 23, 2003 8:44 PM

Give Canoo WebTest a try:
http://webtest.canoo.com/webtest/manual/WebTestHome.html

Posted by tobias at September 23, 2003 11:07 PM

I'll second the suggestion of Canoo WebTest. It really cuts down on the cost on using HttpUnit. It's basically a scripting framework around HttpUnit leveraging Ant as the scripting language. Extremely easy to customize and/or extend, if necessary. Integrates nicely with build scripts and IDE's b/c of the Ant ancestry.

Posted by Daniel Potter at September 24, 2003 1:44 AM

Check out http://webwalker.sourceforge.net/
I wrote it to extend httpunit with an xml frontend, so you don't have to write code to script a test. It's open source so you can extend it for your purposes.

Posted by Blaine at September 24, 2003 3:18 AM


I've found once you get a well written first test with some utilities to perform common HTTPUnit actions on the site you are testing (login/logout) then it seems to really take off.

I had the perfect example of a good test just yesterday. I had a written a HTTPUnit test quite a while back that makes sure an error message is given to the user and they are kicked out of the system cleanly when they try to operate the site with a timeout out session. I actually implemented it because people kept breaking the behaviour and of course didn't think to always test this obscure yet important requirement.

So yesterday someone did a seeminly unrelated change to a file which broke the test. Yay it just payed for itself because it now lets that person know what they have broken ...... unless they checked the code in anyway because they thought the test might have been dodgey :(

Yes ..... they broke the test and ignored it. Now that's a wasted investment.

Posted by Daniel Bradby at September 24, 2003 9:26 AM

HttpUnit tests really do pay off. It may seem hard to justify them when you're already deep into a project (and have to go back and write all sorts of tests), but they really make life easier.

If you work in a really small team, it allevates a lot of the pressure/time involved in testing; if you work in a big group it makes it easier detect buggy code introduced by someone else.

Posted by a web developer at February 27, 2004 9:18 AM