Java: How to fix Spring @Autowired annotation not working issues

Spring is a powerful framework, but it requires some skill to use efficiently. When I started working with Spring a while ago (actually Spring Boot to develop microservices) I encountered some challenges related to dependency injection and using the @Autowired annotation. In this blog I'll explain the issues and possible solutions. Do note that since I do not have a long history with Spring, the provided solutions might not be the best ones.

MockServer: Easy mocking of HTTP(S) services (e.g. SOAP or JSON)

Testing services as an atomic entity can be difficult. Especially if these services are part of a call chain or call other services. Often in such cases mock services are developed to reduce test dependencies and exclude services which are not interesting to the specific test case. For example, I'm testing service A. Service A calls service B. I'm not interested in service B (or service B is maintained by another department on which I don't want to depend). I would mock service B when testing service A in this case. There are several methods to create mock services. These methods however are mostly not easily usable by testers since they require developing/coding mock services. Testers would benefit from being able to create their own mock services in order to create different tests for a specific service.

In this blog post I provide a brief introduction and describe some features of MockServer. An open source product which can be used to mock services. For a more detailed article (with more examples) you can look at the following written by my colleague Robert van Mölken: http://technology.amis.nl/2014/03/06/functional-boundary-testing-of-a-service-based-environment-using-mockserver/

The below image was taken from http://www.mock-server.com/