Can I test locally when developing for Amazon Elastic Beanstalk?

Question

I am trying to get started with Amazon AWS Elastic Beanstalk and as I learn more about it, it seems like I will not be able to test my webapp locally. I understand I can build a war file and run it in a local Tomcat, but it looks like once I need a datastore (I want to use dynamodb) I will have to connect to aws. Ideally I would be able to run a test instance locally (not having to connect to aws to test). Is that a reasonable thing to do or am I going about this wrong?