About a month ago, I announced a new project, FacesTester, a JUnit-based testing tool for JSF that my good friend Rod Coffin and I have undertaken. Since then, Rod posted a very nice introduction to FacesTester usage. Today, we made our first official release, FacesTester 0.1. The version number should indicate that it's still a work in progress, but it is already quite functional (I, for one, have been using it to build a test suite for Mojarra Scales, which has helped drive out features and resolve bugs very quickly). We wanted to push out a release to encourage people to download it, use it, and give us feedback.

So what does FacesTester currently support? Quite a bit. In this entry, we'll take a quick look at what FacesTester offers, and what we have planned. // more

Without diving into code too much, which Rod has covered nicely, here's a quick list of what we support:

While that is, I think, a pretty nice set of features, we have more work planned. For example, the faces-config.xml static analysis will eventually cover as many of the valid configuration elements as possible (e.g., Renderer declarations, navigation cases, PhaseListeners, etc); we currently do not support query string parameters, which I'll be fixing shortly; and so on.

If you're a JSF developer, we'd love for you try this out and tell us what works, what doesn't, and what you'd like to see. The project is hosted on kenai.com , where we have forums and, most importantly, an issue tracker . You can download the jar file directly from the Kenai project site , or, if you're a Maven user, the jar is available from the java.net Maven 2 repository :

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.steeplesoft.jsf</groupId>
    <artifactId>facestester</artifactId>
    <version>0.1</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

Any and all feedback is welcome!