10.11 Testing Against Multiple Servers

10.11.1 Problem

You want to set up your Ant build process to deploy and test your code against multiple servers.

10.11.2 Solution

Set up your Ant buildfile to deploy and execute your server-side test suite for multiple servers.

10.11.3 Discussion

Throughout this book, we have discussed numerous approaches for testing server-side code. This chapter discusses hot-deploying applications to a running server in order to facilitate test-first development. Hot deploying is critical because it takes too long to restart most servers. Setting up your Ant buildfile to hot deploy to Tomcat takes a little effort, but you will save time throughout the project because you will be writing testable code in a stable environment. Hot deploying to JBoss is easy. Simply drop an EAR or WAR file into the appropriate deploy directory. Once the Ant buildfile is set up, you can simply execute an Ant target that packages your applications, including tests, and deploys them to multiple servers. Next, Ant executes the tests within each server. This ensures that your application is server neutral. For example, you could package and deploy to Tomcat and JBoss/Tomcat.

10.11.4 See Also

Recipe 10.3 shows how to hot deploy to Tomcat. Recipe 10.9 and Recipe 10.10 discuss how to hot deploy to JBoss.