If you think doing integration testing is significantly slower, complex or just plain harder than unit testing, think again. In this video, Aslak shows how quickly you can go from an empty directory (0mph) to a project that runs a CDI test inside a managed JBoss AS 7 container (60mph) in under a minute using the Arquillian plugin for Seam Forge.

Arquillian + Seam Forge 0-60 in under a minute from Aslak Knutsen on Vimeo.

Notice that the test cold boots JBoss AS 7, deploys the tests and runs it in-container, then undeploys and shuts down the server in < 5 seconds. (It runs even faster when you take away the Maven cycle).

A quote by Brian Leathem is suitable for quoting here:

With tools like Arquillian, Shrinkwrap, [and] in-memory databases, [we] are busting through the old barriers of terms like unit and integration tests. Perhaps we need a new term for them: "real tests" or "useful tests" are two possibilities that come to mind.

Don't mock. Test for real.

Great news! We've drastically cut down the number of dependencies that Maven has to download in order to use the JBoss AS 6 remote container adapter Arquillian. You no longer have to download Hibernate just to connect to a remote or managed (standalone) JBoss AS instance

To cut to the chase, replace this dependency:

<dependency>
   <groupId>org.jboss.jbossas</groupId>
   <artifactId>jboss-as-client</artifactId>
   <version>6.0.0.Final</version>
   <type>pom</type>
</dependency>

with this one:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.jboss.jbossas</groupId>
  <artifactId>jboss-as-profileservice-client</artifactId>
  <version>6.0.0.Final</version>
  <type>pom</type>
</dependency>

The number of dependencies drops from 318 to just 28! That should save you a heaps of time. Now, Maven doesn't have download these extra dependenices on the first run, and doesn't have to resolve the graph on subsequent invocations. You also cut out this unresolved pom warning:

[WARNING] The POM for ws-commons:policy:jar:1.0 is invalid, transitive dependencies
(if any) will not be available, enable debug logging for more details

To make a long story short, the JBoss AS team publishes a stack POM (i.e., BOM) to identify all the dependencies used in JBoss AS. The client POM is a little too well linked and ends up depending on JBoss AS itself somewhere down the line. As you can imagine, this pulls in a lot of transitive dependencies.

The profile service client POM is a trimmed down version that grabs only the libraries needed for communicating with a remote (standalone) JBoss AS instance using the DeploymentManager, which is accessed via the ProfileService.

Cut the internet a break and update your POM today