Countdown to Grails 2.0: Unit testing | SpringSource Team Blog

Countdown to Grails 2.0: Unit testing | SpringSource Team Blog

The first milestone of Grails 1.4 (now 2.0) has now been released and we are on the last stages of the journey towards 1.4 2.0 final. As we approach that point, I will be writing a series of blog posts that cover the various new features and changes that the 1.4 2.0 version brings. I'll be starting with the new testing support.
Since the beginning, Grails has provided three levels of testing support for developers: unit, integration, and functional. Unit tests had and still have the benefit of running independently of Grails, but they typically required a fair bit of extra work in the form of mocking. The unit test framework introduced with Grails 1.1 helped with that mocking, but it still didn't cover all use cases and so developers needed to resort to integration tests, which run inside a bootstrapped Grails instance, earlier than was desirable.
Grails 2.0 introduces significant changes that improve the situation considerably:

• the unit test support can be integrated into any test framework (no more base classes);
• it has a full in-memory GORM implementation; and
• it better supports testing REST actions, file uploads, and more.

So what do these changes look like to you as a user?