I got a request - come help me with these failing unit tests. The cause? The dreaded Null Pointer Exception. A member variable wasn't initialised in the constructor, but in in an init() method annotated with javax.annotation.PostConstruct. The inital impulse was to call init in the tests, but this would have led to other problems as other member variables would try to acquire container resources via JNDI (and a ServiceLocater pattern), and since this is a unit test we are mocking those dependencies. The better idea is to factor the initialisation of the attributes that are needed all the time into the constructor (which solved the NPE problem), and those attributes that are holding container resources into the @PostConstruct method since the container will honour the annotation; whereas in the unit test we can setup up the dependencies with mocks. A nice little trick but one that's very powerful.
A better approach is of course to use a DI framework, but that still doesn't get around a bad design. Separating container concerns into a @PostConstruct method (and using constructor injection perhaps) makes the class more testable with the tests taking the responsibility for being the container.
