I managed to come up with a JUnit-based test fixture which ensures its test methods are all run in a web start environment. This works well under Windows and OSX; unfortunately *nix variations use NetX which needs some extra hand-holding when first run.
Finding the right hooks involved standard hacking to find whether the most configurability was offered by invoking the javaws executable or adding the javaws classes to my classpath and hooking directly into the Java. I ended up doing a Runtime.exec to ensure the running environment wouldn't interfere with that of Web Start.
The main obstacle to be overcome was signed code. You can get web start to run unsigned code by tweaking the local policy file to allow the code we're testing, but when you include any native code via the
<nativelib> tag, JNLP requires the <all-permission> tag, which seems to re-trigger the requirement for signed code. Self-signing the code is no big deal, but that triggers web-starts authorization dialogs to allow the unknown CA to be used. Fortunately, the somewhat obscure deployment properties file can be used to temporarily allow the self-signed certs and bypass the dialogs. The tests can be run entirely without user input (except in the case of *nix, where NetX is not sufficiently configurable -- you have to dismiss the dialog on the first test run).Unfortunately the exit codes for javaws don't correspond to the codes passed to System.exit by Java code, so I had to have the test fixture communicate to the running javaws instance via socket. Failures are transmitted by the fixture in such a way that you can't tell that the test is running in a separate process.
I encapsulated the deployment config, JNLP file creation, javaws launch, and test case execution into a single class, WebStartTest, which runs a few self tests and can be extended to add whatever other tests you need to run under web start. The JNLP is partly hard-coded to include files set up sepecifically for JNA testing, but should be trivial to change to accommodate a different project.
There are probably other ways to test WebStart code, but this fit nicely with the project's existing tests, allowing its WebStart features to be tested by test methods identical to those for the rest of the project.
Full source is here. This has been tested under Sun and IBM JDKs, on Windows, OSX, Solaris/sparc, and GNU/Linux.
