Unit testing a Hibernate driven application? [closed]

Question

This may be a naive question, but I am new to both the junit and hibernate frameworks and I was wondering what the best way to go about unit testing an application that is largely calls to hibernate, or if it is even necessary to do so?

What is the best practice here?

EDIT:
Spring seems to be the big suggestion here. Unfortunately this may be alittle too much to bite off for one project. Junit, Hibernate and Spring are all new to me, and while they are all technologies I want to get under my belt, I think trying to incorporate them all into one project may be too overwhelming for me.

Links to tutorials and/or book suggestions are welcome.

Answer 1

Keep in mind the difference between unit testing and integration testing.

Unit tests should be testing code without any outside dependencies. These dependencies are mocked using a framework like, for example, JMock.

Integration tests are important too but the major drawback of them is that they take a long time to run. You can run thousands of true unit tests in a couple of seconds, but it's not the same with integration tests.

Depending on the size of your project/development team you might want to prioritize true unit tests over integration tests. Both style of tests are important but if you are pressed for resources, just going with Unit testing may be a better idea.

I wrote an application by myself that unit tested the Web (with Spring MVC this is easy) and Service layers, as well as domain objects. But I left the DAO alone because I didn't want to write a bunch of slow integration tests. If I had more people on staff I would have gone with integration tests as well, but in this case I didn't feel the time spent would be worth it.