Both the grader and a student in class pointed me to this testing tool:
Selenium: it is useful for performance testing a Web application.
Here are two articles discussing it: for and against
Another testing tool, this time focusing on Databases, is called dbunit. According to the student who sent me the pointer, it allows you to wrap unit tests in database transactions, but also to populate the database differently on a test by test basis and clean it up afterwards
.