[Proposal] Tomcat and Cactus

[Vincent Massol <vm...@octo.com>]

Hi Tomcat developers,

This is a proposal to bring Jakarta Tomcat and Jakarta Cactus
(http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus) closer. I hope you'll like it.
 
(0) Rationale

Jakarta Cactus is a unit testing framework for testing Servlet, Taglibs
and Filters. Jakarta Tomcat is a Servlet engine (Servlet, Taglibs,
Filters). They are both part of the Jakarta community. At the moment,
there are no existing Servlet container that have an easy way to unit
test Servlets. The idea is to bring this ease of use to Tomcat by making
it easy to use Cactus within Tomcat (in other words, add a unit testing
service to Tomcat).

(1) Scope of the proposal

a) To bundle Cactus within Tomcat so that it provides a unique ease of
use for Tomcat users who wishes to test their servlet code
b) To make Cactus the official Tomcat test framework for end users

(1) From the point of view of Tomcat users

By providing the bundling defined in point (2) below, Tomcat end users
would only have to do the following to test their code (see
http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/1.4/howto_tomcat.html, steps 4 to 6) :

a) Create Cactus test classes in their WEB-INF/classes directory
b) Open a browser and type the URL of the Cactus test runner, passing
the name of the test class (see the link above for details)

(2) Cactus bundling in Tomcat

"Bundling" Cactus in Tomcat means (see steps 1 to 3 on the above link) :

a) Adding the following jars to common/lib : cactus.jar, junit.jar,
httpclient.jar, aspectjrt.jar (total of 423 KB)
b) Adding the Cactus servlet test runner and redirector servlet and
mappings in conf/web.xml

(3) Versions

The target Tomcat version for this proposal is 4.0 and greater. The
Cactus one is 1.4 and greater (note that Cactus 1.4 is not released yet
and is still in CVS - It can be downloaded from the nightly build).

Comments, ideas ?

Thank you
-Vincent (from the Cactus team)


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