Unit tests vs integration tests with Spring

Question

I\'m working on a Spring MVC project, and I have unit tests for all of the various components in the source tree.

For example, if I have a controller HomeContr

Answer 1

A lot of the tedious double-book-keeping with spring goes away if you also switch to a purely annotated regime, where you annotate all your beans with @Component, @Controller, @Service and @Repository. Just add @Autowired to the attributes you need to get injected.

See section 3.11 of the spring reference manual. http://static.springframework.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/reference/beans.html#beans-annotation-config

On a related note, we have been using the division Unit/Integratrion tests that KenG describe. In my most recent regime we have also introduced a third "class" of tests, "ComponentTests". These run with full spring wiring, but with wired stub implementations (using component-scan filters and annotations in spring).

The reason we did this was because for some of the "service" layer you end up with an horrendous amount of hand-coded wiring logic to manually wire up the bean, and sometimes ridiculous amounts of mock-objects. 100 lines of wiring for 5 lines of test is not uncommon. The component tests alleviate this problem.