Propagating web exceptions to the test environment

Rather than use in-container testing such as Cactus, our project elected to run the tests separately and communicate with the web using httpunit and jwebunit. For the most part this has worked well but one lingering issue was that exceptions thrown in the container are hidden from the tests, and only show up as the exception handling page (our "red screen").

But, that is different now. We had passed the web session back and forth (a clever trick from Andrew McCormick using a helper servlet) using standard object serialization, but flattened it to a string on the trip back because of serial id mismatches. Then last night I realized that I could use XML serialization from the JDK (XMLEncoder) to serialize the session without worrying about mismatch issues. Once this worked, it was a small step to see to serialize web exceptions and rethrow them in unit tests. A rather neat solution, I think.