Does a framework like Factory Girl exist for Java?

Question

Factory Girl is a handy framework in rails for easily creating instances of models for testing. From the Factory Girl home page: factory_girl allows you to quickly define prototypes for each of your models and ask for instances with properties that are important to the test at hand. An example (also from the home page): ``` Factory.sequence :email do |n| "somebody#{n}@example.com" end # Let's define a factory for the User model. The class name is guessed from the # factory name. Factory.define :user do |f| # These properties are set statically, and are evaluated when the factory is # defined. f.first_name 'John' f.last_name 'Doe' f.admin false # This property is set "lazily." The block will be called whenever an # instance is generated, and the return value of the block is used as the # value for the attribute. f.email { Factory.next(:email) } end ``` if I need a user a can just call ``` test_user = Factory(:user, :admin => true) ``` which will yield a user with all the properties spe…

Accepted Answer

One possible library for doing this is Usurper.

However, if you want to specify properties of the objects you are creating, then Java's static typing makes a framework pointless. You'd have to specify the property names as strings so that the framework could look up property accessors using reflection or Java Bean introspection. That would make refactoring much more difficult.

It's much simpler to just new up the objects and call their methods. If you want to avoid lots of boilerplate code in tests, the Test Data Builder pattern can help.

Does a framework like Factory Girl exist for Java?

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