9.3 Planning for Development

Once the requirements are clearly understood, the next step is to plan for development. Java is going to be our implementation technology because it easily provides both interfaces in our requirements (console and web service), has robust networking capabilities, and allows access to a variety of open source tools that might be useful for our project.

The principles of simplicity and sanity mandate that we provide thorough unit testing of the entire application. For this, we need JUnit. Since we are also talking about providing a web service frontend and making a lot of network calls, it behooves us to get a hold of HTTPUnit and the Jakarta Cactus tool as well. HTTPUnit is a tool that allows our unit tests to act like a browser, performing web requests and examining web responses. They model the end user's view of a web page or other HTTP endpoint. Cactus is a little different. It also exercises server code, but instead of examining it from the client's viewpoint, it does so from the container's viewpoint. If we write a servlet, Cactus can operate as the container for that servlet, and test its interaction with the container directly.

In addition to the unit-testing apparatus, we need a build tool. Ant is, of course, the answer. There really is no other choice when it comes to providing robust build support.