Mocking JDBC Connections with MockRunner
Last week I published an article, An Intro into Test Driven Development with Junit4, which got somewhat mixed reviews. One particular commenter on reddit suggested I didn't understand that unit tests shouldn't talk to its data source. I decided to do some investigating into his claims, you can check out my findings here. I was however intrigued none the less and started looking for a tool that would allow me to easily mock a JDBC connection. I found Mockrunner to be the easiest to use of the ones I have found. Below is a brief tutorial on how to use Mockrunner. (Keep in mind that I am still fairly new to using Mockrunner)
Ramblings: Should unit tests talk to a data source?
Last week I published an article on test driven development. One person who read my article (briefly) suggested I did not know that unit tests shouldn't talk to their data source. I plan on covering how to mock JDBC connections later this week, however I wanted to do some research to see if what my critic says is an industry standard or a philosophical choice.
Surprisingly there seems to be relatively little information on this subject, or I have been incapable of finding information. From what I have gathered though, the theory that data sources should be mocked is sound, but its may not always be practical to implement it. Below is two reasons why data source connections should be mocked and three reasons why they should not.
Link dump 11/3
http://www.developerart.com – A new blog like my own. While not a whole lot yet, the content that is on his site is of high quality.
Kind of a smallish link dump I know. I plan on getting some new articles posted this week, namely an update to my TDD article I posted last Monday. So check back soon.
Categories
Tag Cloud
Archives
- November 2009 (3)
- October 2009 (18)
- September 2009 (15)