It was one of my first projects where we really put focus on TDD (and integration testing in general) and it has paid off handsomely for us, both in terms of stability and the ability to meet our deadlines. Especially after a lot of scope was added shortly afterwards and our large library of unit tests and integration tests allowed us to avoid any regressions.

I wrote an article about our experiences and what is the complete stack we used, I hope it will be of use to many of you:

http://www.developer.com/java/web/article.php/3855706/A-Test-Driven-Development-Stack-for-Java-Maven-Jetty-Mockito-and-JAX-RS.htm

http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/42551

Via low-level javac and Eclipse integration it allows to remove a lot of the Java verbosity by replacing it with compile time code generation.

E.g. your Java POJO just needs now the variable declarations:

@Data
class Person {

private String firstName;
private String lastName;
}

The @Data annotation will automatically generate the setters/getters, hashCode(), equals(), code, etc.

So right away in Eclipse you can do:

person.getFirstName()

even though you didn’t need to code the JavaBean setters/getters manually.

Simply amazing. See their website for more info (including automatic resource management, before it even comes in Java 7).

This project could blow the door open on the sorts of enhancements to Java Sun has failed to deliver in the last few years.

An approach we used to evaluate replacing our legacy J2EE stack with a much more productive and lighter Jetty/Spring equivalent.

http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/39964

A good intro to this good addition to the Java platform, although it also highlights one of its major flaws, namely code verbosity.