Testing is now considered an integral part of the programmers job. TDD is a technique that promotes reasonable simple unit test as precursor to implementation, significantly enhancing the robustness of the classes under test.
The essential elements of TDD are fairly easy to grasp. The support libraries (xUnit) are relatively straightforward, and we can expect our IDE to provide direct assistance to using these libraries. Here we look at the facilities Eclipse provides to the JUnit library.
One way of becoming familiar with TDD is to explore some simple examples of various strategies that might be employed in some simple examples. Here we look at useful examples from the Pragmatic series - which laid out much of the early exploration of TDD.
Accessing http and the donations api can be encapsulated in purpose built classes. We can then simplify the tests significantly, and expand them to be a more comprehensive exercise of the API.