JUnit - Few beginner questions

[K Aditi]

I planning to use JUnit 3.x plugin in Eclipse 3.1 for white box testing.
Are there some guidelines to be followed while writing JUnit tests?
I came across this. But the article seems pretty old. Is it pertinent even today?
Is JUnit 4.x way more better than JUnit3.x?What are the pros and cons? I think JUnit 4.x doesn't give a GUI based output in Eclipse.
I have read about @BeforeClass and @AfterClass annotations.Is there an equivalent mechanism in JUnit 3.x.
And I couldn't figure out how am I going to test for expected output when I am working on a database system?

[Amaru Shakur]

only major guideline i can suggest that people dont follow right away is to test actions and not methods. for example if your testing involves a database try focusing your testing on behavior (like testing the select process) vs testing specific methods (like testing getters and setters). you can throw asserts anywhere but try to keep your tests focused on the behaviors your code is going to have to do.

[K Aditi]

Thanks Amaru. Will keep that in mind.

[Ilja Preuss]

Eclipse has full JUnit 4 support. The only valid reason I could imagine for using JUnit 3 these days is having to use a Java version before 1.5.