I tried using the assertEquals method on a float and eclipse says that the method was depreciated. Therefore, is the following alternative acceptable?
Assert.ass
In general you can compare primitive types with ==, but with floating point values, two values can look the same (when formatted as a string) but be two different values. You should be using assertEquals(expected, actual, delta). See the answer to JUnit: assertEquals for double values.
Because double (and float) calculations are not necessarily exact, you can compare using a delta (effectively a margin of error).