Running swing with UI being invisible

Question

I work on a swing based application and we use jemmy to write automated tests for the application. The problem is that we have a lot of tests and running them takes a lot of time. One of the bottleneck is that the test brings up the UI and then performs action on the UI like populating test boxes,dropdowns, clicks button etc. What I am looking for is a way to run the tests so that the UI is invisible so that the test runs as if the UI is there but it doesn't show up on the monitor. Can someone guide me as to whether such a thing is even possible ad if yes how? Thanks Ankit

Answer 1

This doesn't work out of the box - Swing needs an actual graphics device to render to.

However, you may be able to set this up using a virtual graphics driver or framebuffer. For instance, under Linux we used Xvfb successfully to run Swing applications 'headless'.

That being said, this does not accelerate automated UI tests. If anything, the in-memory rendering of a virtual framebuffer is slower than that of an actual graphics card.