JUnit 4: Set up things in a test suite before tests are run (like a test's @BeforeClass method, just for a test suite)

Question

I want to do some functional testing on a (restful) webservice. The testsuite contains a bunch of test cases, each of which performs a couple of HTTP requests on the webserv

Answer 1

One option is to use something like Apache Ant to launch your unit test suite. You can then put a target invocation before and after your junit target to start and stop your webservice:

You then run your suite using ant (or your integration tool of choice). Most IDEs have Ant support, and it makes it much easier to move your tests into a continous integration environment (many of which use Ant targets to define their own tests).