Comments on: HtmlUnit vs HttpUnit

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:20:48 +0000

Good comparison – I like what HtmlUnit offers, but I also like the simplicity of HttpUnit’s setup (1.7). HtmlUnit has way too many dependencies to manage on a host of machines simultaneously (regardless of what IBM wants us to believe about virtualization).

I’d love to try out HtmlUnit, but could you clean up the dependency list? HttpUnit include basic classes of all necessary libraries and links to go get better ones if you want them.

Also, documentation is huge – most of these sites/tools are aimed at developers testing their own code, but remember there are a lot of QA types that lack the developers understanding AND the developers environment. Too many things can be taken for granted in the documentation. (Just getting Junit up and running basic tests took 3 days – due to assumptions in the documentation) Remember your audience is never as smart as you think you are.

Good article, albeit a bit old!

By: eclotone

eclotone — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 07:19:17 +0000

Hi Simon,

when you talk about in-process testing, is this here something along the lines of what you mean: http://lunchbreakers.wordpress.com/on-java-web-application-testing

Cheers,
Joerg

By: Marcio Wesley Borges

Marcio Wesley Borges — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 02:02:35 +0000

Nice explanation.
Thank you!

By: Constantine Kulak

Constantine Kulak — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:10:19 +0000

Thanks for the article! I tried to use HttpUnit in a DB2 8.1 stored procedure (don’t ask me why), and it just crashes its fenced mode. In 9.5 it works, but only if I put all supporting JAR files to DB2 JRE, because otherwise Xerces won’t work (it’s used internally by HttpUnit). I’ve spent two days struggling with that, and I wish I’d found your article before.

By: Oudated knowledge of “experts”: the example of HttpUnit « Marc Guillemot’s blog

Fri, 23 May 2008 12:02:23 +0000

[...] his blog post “HtmlUnit vs HttpUnit“, Daniel Gredler wrote “HttpUnit is to the web app testing world what Struts is to the [...]

By: Sargon Benjamin

Sargon Benjamin — Fri, 23 May 2008 06:30:58 +0000

I just noticed that HttpUnit 1.7 was released on May 20, 2008. I also noted that Wolfgang is a key committer and revived the HttpUnit project – kudos to you!

By: Sargon Benjamin

Sargon Benjamin — Fri, 23 May 2008 01:26:59 +0000

Thanks for the post and great comments! In response to Wolfgang, I’m currently a BIG fan of httpunit. Its easy to add to and to build a framework around.
My web app under test doesn’t use javascript at all so I am lucky in the regard. The one nicety is that httpunit lets me know the content type of various response pages (text/html or text/xml) and I can then do further processing there. However, httpunit can’t provide any verification features (eg getElementNames() or verifyTextPresent() ) on pages whose content type is ‘text/xml’. I wouldn’t expect it to either so I’m just using the Response.getText() and then doing some custom verification (XMLUnit and simple java regex).
I don’t have much reason to move to a new framework; however, I have been reading about JWebUnit and looking at its 2.0 features (Selenium integration seems nice). It would be nice to have Selenium scripts using the same framework I’m using for my non GUI tests and JWebUnit has the potential to do that. JWebUnit is built on top of HtmlUnit, atleast thats what I’m reading, and so I may just make the switch over to JWebUnit.
Is there anything that HTTPUnit can do that HtmlUnit / JWebUnit can’t do (I don’t use the ServletUnit functionality that Simon mentioned so thats a non issue for us. If Simon could elaborate on what he’s built, that would be nice too!)

By: WolfgangFahl

WolfgangFahl — Tue, 13 May 2008 10:40:46 +0000

Thank you Daniel and Marc for getting in touch.
I wonder what current httpunit users are saying. I did not try out htmlunit myself yet so I can’t state anything yet about how the two projects compare.
Let’s see what happens during the upcoming months.

By: Marc Guillemot

Marc Guillemot — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 10:58:49 +0000

Wolfgang,

interesting to see that HttpUnit is not fully dead. On the other hand I don’t expect so much progress particularly in JS support, no matter how many energy you deploy: HttpUnit current JS support capabilities are approximatively comparable to what HtmlUnit could do in 2004. Looking back at its state in 2004 I can say that it represents only a small part of the current HtmlUnit JS support capabilities. 750 running tests is not really a high number: HtmlUnit has currently over 3300 running tests (some of them are large test suites of AJAX libraries) and this is surely not enough.

I agree with you that a collaboration could allow to progress faster nevertheless I’ve already contacted you for a few days… but without response.

By: WolfgangFahl

WolfgangFahl — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:50:04 +0000

Some of the statements here are out of date. Since mid 2007 I’m a committer on the httpunit project. So it’s not a one man show at this time.

First I should say that I’ve been sharing your frustration about how httpunit was handled since mid 2004. I’ve been sticking to my own patched version until the middle of 2007 when I finally decided to ask Russell for committer
rights which he kindly assigned to me.

I’ve worked hard to get the patches of some 3 years into the project and I’m done with that. I’ve done some 200 tracker items in the last three days alone and version 1.7 and 2.0 are due soon. The javascript support of httpunit is being improved with a new DOM scripting engine. There are over 750 running test cases at this time.

From my point of view it’s a pitty that there is a split of the developer resources around the unit testing issue of html pages. I don’t know what Russell’s opinion on this is.

Feel free to contact me via the contact form on my webpage or the e-mail shown there.