The Demo App

Xceptance provides a demo application called Posters Demo Store or just Posters, which is a small e-commerce store that can be used for learning and demoing load testing as well as test automation.

Posters is a shop software written in Java, so you will need Java 17 on your machine to run it. Being small and easy to deploy, it is well suited to demonstrate testing with XLT.

Getting the Posters Application

The latest version of Posters can be downloaded from Github. Place the JAR file posters-demo-store-<version>.jar anywhere on your local disk.

Building Posters

As an alternative to downloading a prepackaged JAR file, you can build the JAR yourself. Posters Demo Store is a regular Maven project, so you will need to have Maven installed on your machine. To build the project yourself, clone the Github repository to your local disk and run:

mvn clean package

If all went well, you will find several build artifacts in the target subdirectory, but the most important one is posters-demo-store-<version>.jar. This file contains the Posters code and all required libraries (including a Web application server) in a single, ready-to-run JAR file.

Running Posters as a Console Application

If you have successfully downloaded or built the Posters JAR file, you can now run Posters with the default settings as follows:

java -jar posters-demo-store-<version>.jar          # downloaded
java -jar target/posters-demo-store-<version>.jar   # built yourself

By default, the shop is available at http://localhost:8080/ and https://localhost:8443/. When opening the homepage via HTTPS, expect your browser to complain about the certificate since Posters comes with a self-signed certificate.

Posters stores its database and log files to the subdirectories db and login the current directory.

When Posters is started for the first time, it will populate its database with a basic product catalog and a default customer (email: john@doe.com / password: topsecret). With more and more customers registering with the shop and placing orders, the database will grow over time.

If you want to start over with a clean database, simply stop the app and delete the subdirectory db. On the next start, Posters will recreate the directory and the database.