Testing with a Classloader
When building utility classes, testing becomes more important than in other parts of the software. Utilities are hopefully (re)used a lot and thus should have the most reliable behavior. This also means that documentation should always be up to date. Though utilities are generally easy, they might not be the easiest to test. I created a little example of a utility that I often use, depending on the application, often bearing the name "SettingsUtil". It's a simple class that returns properties from a property file somewhere on the classpath and returns either the value for a specified key from the properties file or a default value if no value is associated with the given key. ...