Spring: Test Framework Never Heard of Web Apps?

Do you know the Spring TestContext Framework? You really should. It drastically simplifies JUnit-testing of Spring powered applications. One particular cool thing is that it offers an easy, annotation based way to load your Spring context and auto-wire your beans. For example, this is how it could look like for JUnit 4:

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@ContextConfiguration(locations = "classpath:spring-config/ui-test-config.xml")
public class MyParticularTest {
  @Autowired
  private Controller controller;
  ...
}

This is really nice, but... there is one thing we stumbled upon lately.

The test framework by default is using the GenericXmlContextLoader which loads the Spring application context as an instance of GenericApplicationContext. This class, obviously, is not aware of web applications that would require a WebApplicationContext instead. Hence, you can't access any web related resources, use associated scopes etc.

Don't get me wrong... Spring TestContext Framework is nice, but it's more than strange that it does not support the web scenario. There is a Jira issue for that, but it's still open for more than 10 months now, and is scheduled not until Spring 3.1?!? That's just annoying.

Well, there are some workarounds of course, based on using a custom context loader. See this blog post or this Spring community thread, for instance.