Attivio uses Jetty and Apache CXF to provide Web Services. We use javax XML bind annotations on our Java objects for automatic generation of WSDL types and serialization of our objects. Overall this configuration has worked very well for us. But recently we encountered a few problems when using interfaces for the first time, implemented in multiple modules. Initially we got the exceptions IllegalAnnotationsException and MarshalException, while attempting this, but finally found the right combination of annotations to solve our problem.

Even though all the pieces to this puzzle can already be found on the web, this article provides a summary and attached example of everything working together in a single JUnit test.

As mentioned in other Attivio blogs, we use many tools in our agile development environment, including Ant and JUnit. We have over 4000 JUnit tests and rely on them to keep our code robust and allow us to quickly deploy quality releases. One obstacle we hit when running our continuous and nightly tests was in determining how to deal with test timeouts and long running tests. Currently JUnit supports setting timeouts on a per-test basis with the @Test(timeout=n) annotation. In addition, the JUnit Ant Task has a parameter, timeout=n, which allows for test timeouts managed outside of JUnit.

Both of these timeout solutions have a serious flaw in that neither gives enough information to help debug what went wrong or was going on when the timeout occurred. After getting occasional timeouts on different tests with no way of understanding why, we decided to enhance JUnit with two new features. We added a capability to set a default timeout for all JUnit tests, and a capability to capture the stack trace of all threads active at the time of the timeout.

Luckily, JUnit 4.5 has the ability to easily override some of its core functionality allowing us to improve the timeout behavior.