Purpose

This tool mentor describes how to perform developer testing of J2EE applications using Rational XDE.

Overview

The following steps are performed in this tool mentor:

• Set-Up the Testing Environment
• Execute Test

Links to topics in the Rational XDE™ online Help are marked with .

Set-Up the Testing Environment

In a J2EE application, in order to unit test a single component, the component may need to be assembled into a J2EE Application and actually deployed. Of course, minimal assembly and deployment is performed at this point -- just enough to get the component up and running in the testing environment. For more information on assembling J2EE applications, see Tool Mentor: Assembling J2EE Modules and Applications Using Rational XDE Developer - Java Platform Edition. For more information on deploying J2EE applications, see Tool Mentor: Deploying J2EE Modules and Applications Using Rational XDE Developer - Java Platform Edition.

If you are using WebSphere Studio Application Developer, you can test your components on the built-in WebSphere Test Environment (WTE). Just select your components in the J2EE Browser in the J2EE Perspective and invoke the "Run on Server" context-menu command. For more information, see the WebSphere Studio Application Developer online help.

If you wish to debug your application on a separate application server, you must start the server with debugging enabled. Consult your server documentation for how to do this. Then, once you deploy your application, you can connect the Eclipse debugger to the server to debug your application. Note that most application servers do not provide a way to debug JSP's (which are compiled into Java code). Consult your server documentation.

Execute Test

Once you have deployed your application, debug your components as you normally would.using the built-in Java debugger and any other debugging or analysis tools you have available.

Note that if you are using WebSphere Studio Application Developer and XDE, you can use Rational Purify and XDE's Trace feature to debug and trace your running J2EE components in the WebSphere Test Environment (WTE) that is part of Application Developer. Note that XDE Trace does not support components running on remote J2EE application servers. For more information, see Analyzing Run-time Behavior with Rational PurifyPlus Also, it is not currently currently possible to use Trace or PurifyPlus with JSP pages.