Why must jUnit's fixtureSetup be static?

Question

I marked a method with jUnit\'s @BeforeClass annotation, and got this exception saying it must be static. What\'s the rationale? This forces all my init to be on static fiel

Answer 1

To resolve this issue just change the method

public void setUpBeforeClass 

to

public static void setUpBeforeClass()

and all that are defined in this method to static.

Answer 2

The short answer is this: there is no good reason for it to be static.

In fact, making it static causes all sorts of problems if you use Junit to execute DBUnit based DAO integration tests. The static requirement interferes with dependency injection, application context access, resource handling, logging, and anything that depends on "getClass".