Spring Boot with Cucumber E2E (Selenium) testing - spring

Question

In my project, I have to current Maven modules setup:
- Application
|- (application code, using Spring Boot 1.2.6)
- E2E-testing (has a dependency to Application)
|- src
|- main
|- java
|- AbstractCucumberTest.java
Before, this used to be a Spring 3 application serving JSP pages, so no Boot included. I refactored it to be a Boot application.
The E2E testing setup basically built a WAR file of the application code, and the E2E module booted a Jetty server, running that WAR. All was well.
Now, after the refactor, not so much.
The Jetty setup no longer works as-is. When I boot the WAR, I'm getting class loading exceptions, which are related to Jetty itself. Now, I'm not hung up on Jetty, it's just a testing container for me. So I started digging around in the Boot documentation, because I was convinced there had to be a way to make it all "Boot'-iful, meaning: I could simply boot the application when launching the tests. And there is, of course, so I ended up with these annotations on my AbstractCucumberTest:
#RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
#ContextConfiguration(classes = ApplicationConfig.class, loader = SpringApplicationContextLoader.class)
#WebIntegrationTest({"spring.profiles.active=local"})
public abstract class AbstractCucumberTest extends SeleniumTest {
So, basically, I'm loading the application config of the application, and launching the Tomcat server from the test. And all rejoiced, because now the application was successfully booting upon launching a Cucumber test. The application boots, it reads the classpath, Liquibase boots, everything is working alright. I can call the Actuator endpoints, which all work fine. Even the REST endpoints of the application are all working, so Spring MVC is doing its thing.
However, 1 thing is not, and that's serving JSP's -- and that's of course a deal breaker for E2E tests. Every time I surf to a page, I get the same unnerving 404 error. Before you ask: yes, tomcat-embed-jasper and jstl are present. They are present in the application, I even added them to the E2E pom, no luck. In fact, these are the things I tried, but they all failed:
Excluding the tomcat-embed-jasper and jstl dependency from the application
Copying over the JSP's from the application to the resources of the E2E module
Setting up my own CucumberConfig, which basically contained the same configuration as the ApplicationConfig
It just seems to me that the application cannot find the JSP's. Everything else is working just fine, just the JSP's are not found/served.
Does anyone have any thoughts?
Oh, on a side note, I tried using the spring-boot-maven-plugin, to try and boot the application that way. Problem is, though, that it cannot be forked. In the 1.2.6 release, the fork simply ... does not fork. When I say fork, I mean it in the Jetty way: it boots the application, and gives control back to Maven. It instantiates a "stop" command, which Maven can call after all tests have run.
In the 1.3.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT version, it should be present (using the start goal), but that's still not working for me.
[EDIT] For what it's worth, the Application module is configured to build a WAR file. So it's not JAR packaging.

Answer 1

To whom it may concern, eventually I turned to the Maven Cargo plugin, which works just fine. I configured it in the pom of the E2E testing module. As you can see, my application is marked as a deployable, and the cargo plugin boots at the pre-integration-test phase, and shuts down at post-integration-test phase.
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.cargo</groupId>
<artifactId>cargo-maven2-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.4.16</version>
<configuration>
<container>
<containerId>tomcat8x</containerId>
<zipUrlInstaller>
<url>
http://archive.apache.org/dist/tomcat/tomcat-8/v8.0.27/bin/apache-tomcat-8.0.27.zip
</url>
</zipUrlInstaller>
</container>
<deployables>
<deployable>
<groupId>my.group.id</groupId>
<artifactId>Application</artifactId>
<type>war</type>
<properties>
<context>/context</context>
</properties>
</deployable>
</deployables>
<configuration>
<type>standalone</type>
<properties>
<cargo.servlet.port>9999</cargo.servlet.port>
<cargo.jvmargs>-Dspring.profiles.active=local</cargo.jvmargs>
</properties>
</configuration>
</configuration>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>start-container</id>
<phase>pre-integration-test</phase>
<goals>
<goal>start</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
<execution>
<id>stop-container</id>
<phase>post-integration-test</phase>
<goals>
<goal>stop</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>