One of the downsides of enterprise-class app servers, databases and such, is that it gets expensive to own more than one. It's really implausible to have one of everything for production, another for QA, and a third for developers' integration testing. All that times however many teams or projects you may have. Someone is going to have to without, which is fine, but then how do you test your stuff?

All too often, you don't, and QA becomes the integration test... or, worse yet, production does.

Assuming you'd like to avoid the almost certain disasters that ensue from those scenarios, what do you do? How about replacing the app server and database with mock objects, so you can still expose your business logic to rigorous testing on as many development systems as you'd like?

Bob McCune says Mockrunner may be the answer. In today's Feature Article, Container-free Testing with Mockrunner, he writes:

Mockrunner is a lightweight testing framework, built on JUnit, for testing J2EE applications. Its focus is on transparently simulating your application's runtime environment so you can easily create unit tests that run out-of-container and independently of deployment descriptors or other external artifacts.

The core distribution provides built-in support for testing the most commons J2EE component types including the Servlet APIs, JDBC, JMS, EJB, as well as Struts Actions. Its comprehensive API support makes Mockrunner a compelling tool as it provides a consistent framework for testing your applications from end to end.