Testing Java Sockets

If I was to test the code, I'd do the following.

Firstly, refactor the code so that the Socket isn't directly instantiated in the method you want to test. The example below shows the smallest change I can think of to make that happen. Future changes might factor out the Socket creation to a completely separate class, but I like small steps and I don't like making big changes on untested code.

public boolean sendTo(String hostname, int port) {
    boolean sent = false;

    try {
        Socket socket = createSocket();
        OutputStream out = socket.getOutputStream();
        out.write(payload);
        socket.close();
        sent = true;
    } catch (UnknownHostException e) {
        // TODO
    } catch (IOException e) {
        // TODO
    }

    return sent;
}

protected Socket createSocket() {
    return new Socket();
}

Now that the socket creation logic is outside of the method you are trying to test, you can start to mock things up and hook into the creation the socket.

public class MessageTest {
    @Test
    public void testSimplePayload() () {
        byte[] emptyPayload = new byte[1001];

        // Using Mockito
        final Socket socket = mock(Socket.class);
        final ByteArrayOutputStream byteArrayOutputStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        when(socket.getOutputStream()).thenReturn(byteArrayOutputStream);

        Message text = new Message(emptyPayload) {
            @Override
            protected Socket createSocket() {
                return socket;
            }
        };

        Assert.assertTrue("Message sent successfully", text.sendTo("localhost", "1234"));
        Assert.assertEquals("whatever you wanted to send".getBytes(), byteArrayOutputStream.toByteArray());
    }
}

Overriding individual methods on units you want to test is really useful for testing, especially in ugly code with horrible dependencies. Obviously the best solution is sorting out dependencies (in this case I would think that a Message not depend on a Socket, maybe there is a Messager interface as glowcoder suggests), but it's nice to move towards the solution in the smallest possible steps.