In my opinion, one of the biggest hassles in creating a unit test for something that is driven by data in a repository is creating the properties file to drive the test.

There was a mostly-implemented properties exporter in core but it didn't support writing out the data in the same format that it reads it in (namely, it didn't write the @uuid information or the @type information that it supports when importing from a properties file)

This patch enhances the importer / exporter to the point where you can dump out content to a Properties or to a string representation of the properties.

In addition, the Date nodes weren't dumped properly before. I added in some basic support for dumping and retrieving the Calendar objects from the properties file.

I think that this, combined with another patch I'm about to submit that adds a "dump to properties format" to the JCR Queries page in Admin Interface should greatly reduce the pain for creating unit tests that operate using data from a repository.