Mocking an EJB Container

There are a lot of tests for some EJBs.

Starting an J2EE server is slow. I wanted to test the business logic faster.

Most of the beans reference only each other and a persistence context.

So what should the mock worry about - transaction demarcation and dependency injection. And... exception wrapping and unwrapping.

1. First just add some setters or change the access level modifiers (from private to protected for example).
2. Know your transaction authority.
   
3. Count started transactions. If 0, begin. If 0, commit. Rollback when necessary.
   
4. Listen for all the exceptions and wrap and unwrap them.
5. Reuse as much as possible of the code.
   

If I have some spare time left, I'll write some code.