This article demonstrates a brand new open source library for unit testing, called Unitils. Unitils helps you in writing simple and maintainable unit tests with JUnit or TestNG . It glues together some widely used test libraries like DbUnit and EasyMock and offers integration with Spring and Hibernate . Unitils encourages applying good practices and unit testing guidelines. The ideas behind the code are based on the authors' concrete experience on enterprise projects.
Unitils offers following features
* Equality assertion through reflection, with options like ignoring Java default/null values and ignoring order of collections
* Support for database testing involving test data management with DbUnit, automatic maintenance of unit test databases and automatic constraints disabling
* Hibernate integration features such as session management and testing the mapping with the database
* Integration with Spring, involving ApplicationContext management and injection of spring managed beans
* Integration with EasyMock and injection of mocks into other objects
With the addition of generics in Java 5, writing a custom DAO for each domain object is no longer required. There are a wide variety of articles on creating generic DAOs, but my current project uses the approach from this IBM DeveloperWorks article. This approach was choses mainly because of the clearly written article and the integration with Spring. You should be able to extend any generic DAO based on Spring to implement the stored procedure configuration.
Many enterprise business applications have such requirements that they should log their users' operations; who performs and when, records that are inserted into, deleted from database, or are changed during those operations, with a meaningful description about current state of those records. Hibernate already provides an interceptor mechanism at SessionFactory level. Hibernate fires events indicating new records are inserted, old ones are deleted, detection of updates, and other events related with transaction status, session flush etc. By that way one can easily track changes on persistent entities in his application.
Hibernate Annotations is my preferred way to map my entity classes, since they don't require any external file (thus keeping mapping info in your Java files), is fully integrated with all Hibernate mapping capabilities and Hibernate documentation encourages us to use this kind of configuration because it's more efficient.
Annotation driven mapping in Hibernate uses the standard JPA API annotations and introduce some specific extensions to deal with some Hibernate features. You can find a full reference in the official documentation.