Functional Testing Web Applications for Fun and Profit!

I have been working for a few days now on functional testing our webapps, and I must say that the selection and quality of tools out there right now is rather poor. My initial choice was Cactus, but it is no good for functional testing because it loses the session between test cases. This appears to be by design because apparently there's no way to guarantee the order that the Cactus test cases execute in. It's really a shame too, because I really like the way that Cactus works and how closely integrated with Maven it is. Maybe I'll have to bother the Cactus developers about implementing an easy way to carry the session from test to test, and then I'll figure out some way to run them in the correct order.

Moving on, I checked out Canoo WebTest and HttpUnit, but HttpUnit kept giving me linker errors when I tried to run my test suite and WebTest seemed a bit verbose. Neither of them appealed to my lazy side enough.

Finally, I settled on Latka, at the suggestion of dIon Gillard. dIon wrote a Maven plug-in that can take in JMeter proxy output and turn it into a basic Latka test case. That way I can test my applications by hand through my browser and have the actions that I performed saved and repeated by Latka later. Just add in some verification to the generated Latka test cases and you're good to go. It's definately still kind of messy, but with a little bit of work I think that we could have something great here.