Preface

Anyone involved with the open source community or using open source software knows there are tons of tools available on the market. Keeping up with these tools, and knowing which tools to use and how to use them, is an intimidating road to travel. We hope to simplify your journey by showing concise, useful recipes for some of the more popular open source Java tools on the market today.

We show you tools like JUnit, JUnitPerf, Mock Objects (more of a concept), and Cactus for testing Java code. We show how to generate EJB files using XDoclet, too. All tools discussed in this book are completely executable through Ant, allowing for a complete and stable build environment on any Java-enabled platform.

This is also a book about Extreme Programming (XP), which led us to choose the tools that we did. The XP software development approach does not depend on a particular set of tools; however, the right tools certainly make following XP practices easier. For instance, test-first development is a cornerstone of XP, so most of the tools in this book are testing frameworks. XP also demands continuous integration, which is where Ant fits in. We are big fans of automation, so we cover the XDoclet code generator as well as describe ways to automate deployment to Tomcat and JBoss.