Red Hat Arquillian app testing technology coming next month

24.06.2011
Red Hat is readying a general release of its Arquillian testing technology for enterprise Java application development, which is intended to make it easy for developers to perform integration testing.

Serving as a testing coordinator, allows developers to write integration tests where code being tested runs in the environment where it will run when in production, said Dan Allen, Red Hat principal software engineer. Already offered in a candidate release phase, Arquillian, pronounced "ar keelian," is expected to be available in a final release version next month, likely as part of the tooling in JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.

"Arquillian enables portable integration tests for enterprise apps," said Allen, who spoke at the Jax conference in San Jose, Calif. on Thursday. With Arqullian, the JBoss community at Red Hat seeks to lessen the burden on developers by providing a simple test harness to abstract away container lifecycle and deployment from test logic. Developers can produce a range of integration for enterprise Java applications. Arquillian handles aspects of test execution, including managing the container lifecycle, bundling the test class with dependent classes and resources into a deployable archive and capturing results and failures.

While initially intended for Java, the two-year-old Arquillian project is "branching out very quickly," Allen said. It already has been used for Ruby on Rails testing via the JRuby version of Ruby. It also has been used with the Scala language which, like JRuby, runs on the Java Virtual Machine. Arquillian is part of the JBoss Testing initiative. The name Arquillian was derived from the creatures who battled bugs in the movie "Men in Black," Allen said. "You can kind of think of it as a bug battler."