OSGi, Java EE and CDI Integration Testing with Pax Exam 3

In-container testing is an approach shared by many testing frameworks like Pax Exam, jeeunit, Arquillian and Spring's test context.

Pax Exam 2.x is a mature solution for testing OSGi bundles and applications, jeeunit was created to simplify Java EE 6 integration testing and has been extended to handle stand-alone CDI applications and non-CDI setups based on Tomcat and Spring.

Taking the best of both worlds, the next major release line Pax Exam 3.x is designed to provide a unified testing experience by incorporating additional test containers for Java EE and CDI from jeeunit while staying backward compatible with Pax Exam 2.x for OSGi.

The first public milestone release Pax Exam 3.0.0.M1 is now available from The Central Repository (aka Maven Central), including test containers for GlassFish, OpenWebBeans and Weld.

While jeeunit works with Embedded GlassFish which lacks all OSGi capabilities of the GlassFish server, the Pax Exam GlassFish Container launches GlassFish 3.1.2 on top of an OSGi framework, enabling users to deploy or provision both WAR modules and OSGi bundles, thus providing a test environment for hybrid Java EE/OSGi applications.

A plain old JUnit test class can be turned into an in-container integration test simply by adding a @RunWith(PaxExam.class) annoation and some configuration data in a properties file.

See the Pax Exam 3.0.0.M1 Release Notes for more details and use the OPS4J mailing list (general@lists.ops4j.org) for feedback and support.