Till Klampaeckel has a new post to his blog today looking at the method he's found (through some help from others) to be able to mock out protected methods in his unit tests.

I wrote a couple tests for a small CouchDB access wrapper today. But when I wrote the implementation itself, I realized that my class setup depends on an actual CouchDB server being available and here my journey began.

It was his first experience trying to mock out parts of a class, and he found it a bit difficult to use even after reading this article from Sebastian Bergmann. He ended up, as a first solution, making a "fake" (a term from Ruby testing) that just returned the basic JSON string of an error. Thanks to comments on the post, though, he was able to come up with a more correct solution using getMock() to create a stub and apply an expects() to his "makeRequest" method.