= Getting started with Arquillian and TomEE
:index-group: Arquillian
:jbake-date: 2018-12-05
:jbake-type: page
:jbake-status: published


Arquillian is a testing framework on top of JUnit (or TestNG if you
prefer). It makes it easier to do integration tests in a managed
environment (JEE environment here after).

We provide an embedded and remote adapter, see
link:arquillian-available-adapters.html[the available adapters] for more
details.

In a managed environment it is usually quite difficult to perform unit
tests, due to the fact that most of the time you have to mock almost the
entire environment. It is very time consuming and requires complicated
integration tests that must reflect the production environment as best
as possible. Unit tests lose their true value.

JEE always got seen as an heavy technology, impossible to test and to
use in development. OpenEJB always fought against that idea and proved
that it's really possible.

As David Blevins said:

> "Do not blame EJBs (ie. Java EE) because your
server is not testable."

With latest Java EE specifications (5 and especially 6), it becomes a
reality. Arquillian typically addresses that area. It is basically a
framework that aims at helping/managing the server/container in an
agnostic way. Arquillian is responsible for the lifecycle of the
container (start, deploy, undeploy, stop, etc).

TomEE community heavily invested on that framework to prove it's really
useful and can really help testing Java EE application. That's also an
opportunity to get the most out of TomEE (lightweight, fast,
feature-rich, etc).

[tip]
TIP: See http://arquillian.org[Arquillian.org] for a great quick-start
tutorial on Arquillian itself.