Ok, I have run through the “Get Started Faster with Forge” introduction and it worked. Applause. Let’s start with the findings:

1. Installation of Forge is pretty well documented, although Maven and Git are presented as options, and you will definitely need them for installing the Arquillian plugin.
2. Make sure you have a full set of “HOME” environment variables defined; I have JAVA_HOME, M2_HOME, and FORGE_HOME.
3. Make sure you add the “bin” directories of those three homes to the PATH.
4. Have JBoss AS 7.1.1 installed. You can let Maven do it, but you’d still have to define the path to it manually as described in the steps. Apart from that, I prefer to do the installation of an AS manually.
5. Don’t worry about the long wait while installing the Arquillian plugin. Git needs the time it seems.
6. During the “arquillian setup” step, do not choose the default! The default is 7.1.2 and I didn’t get that working. Choosing the same version number as JBoss AS sounds right anyway.

The full introduction will give you a test for a CDI injected bean and a DAO which creates three records in a @PostConstruct method with a matching test to see if they can be read back.

Kudos to the JBoss teams for Forge and Arquillian! I’ll definitely start using Arquillian. Forge I’m still doubtful about, but that has nothing to do with the quality, just with the concept.