S A M P L E   P R O J E C T  

like accessing the  java:  namespace inside the JNDI server or using local method calls on 

EJBs etc. Clients running outside of the application server can mostly maintain a state and 

cache values / results compensating their disadvantages. 

Tests 

This topic is mostly neglected by most projects because it is tedious, boring and does not 

reward you. Tedious is true in most cases but it does not have to be boring and after some 

nights of debugging you maybe start thinking of a reward for test cases. 

Due the fact that we are coding in a distributed environment bugs are also distributed and 

are hard to find through all the layers. Most of the time you need more time to find a bug 

than to fix it. When the components are tested than you are sure that all the test cases 

works and all the bugs are found on a lower level. If you found a new bug you can add the 

according test case to the list of test cases and improve the quality of your tests. But the 

most important fact is that you can run your test cases every time you made a change and be 

sure that you did not bring in a new bug.  

There are two different types of test. A test where the code is inspected and based on the 

code a test plan is created is called white box tests. When you take the code and just call it 

and check the output then it is called black box tests. 

White box test tools are much easier to use because it frees you from creating the test cases 

but it is up to the tool to define test cases, which is not suitable for testing specifications. It 

also reports any problem even this is not a problem for you. So you could spend more than 

checking the output than writing the test cases. 

Black box testing requires you to write the test cases but you can test specifications and 

ignore problems when it is not one from your view. Thus you can save time on the long haul 

because you only get the problems listed you are interested in. But is it necessary that the 

test cases are designed and written well to ensure high quality. A good test tool is jUnit, 

which is an open source project and used by many other open source projects. 

Template Project 

The basic idea of this template project is to give you a starting point how a project can be 

setup and being ready to use JBoss in no time. It is also the basic for all the examples in this 

manual. Thus all the examples look similar and can be rebuild every time you want to play 

with them. The template only uses open source tools which you can download for free and 

can produce all the necessary components for a J2EE application like EJBs, MBeans, web 

applications, Java clients etc.  

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