HtmlUnit is a "GUI-Less browser for Java programs". It models HTML documents and provides an API that allows you to invoke pages, fill out forms, click links, etc... just like you do in your "normal" browser.
It has fairly good JavaScript support (which is constantly improving) and is able to work even with quite complex AJAX libraries, simulating either Firefox or Internet Explorer depending on the configuration you want to use.
It is typically used for testing purposes or to retrieve information from web sites.
HtmlUnit is not a generic unit testing framework. It is specifically a way to simulate a browser for testing purposes and is intended to be used within another testing framework such as JUnit or TestNG. Refer to the document "Getting Started with HtmlUnit" for an introduction.
HtmlUnit is used as the underlying "browser" by different Open Source tools like Canoo WebTest, JWebUnit, WebDriver, JSFUnit, Celerity, ...
HtmlUnit was originally written by Mike Bowler of Gargoyle Software and is released under the Apache 2 license. Since then, it has received many contributions from other developers, and would not be where it is today without their assistance.
