As many of you know, I have been planning on doing these tests for a
while and have just been swamped. I promise to get back to them at the
beginning of next week!. David Welton makes a good point about wanting
to be able to test the non-presentation layer components outside of the
browser - both Webtest and Selenium can help on this - but we should be
able to put some sort of xUnit tests in place to fill in the gaps that
you're seeing.
Al, you are right about the setup on Selenium - it does take a little
bit longer to get one's head around and will probably be a big help with
some of the AJAX components - but in my experience it's been less than
intuitive to get going and using.
Personally, I still think that Webtest should be able to manage most of
the stuff that we need to do as it's ant driven, emulates a browser, and
potentially could deal with AJAX in a clean way - you just won't be
changing pages. It has a Javascript engine built in, but this is where
I ran into problems a few years ago and unfortunately stopped using it
every day :(
In short, I will pick up this ball again and get some information out to
everyone ASAP.
Cheers,
Tim
--
Tim Ruppert
HotWax Media
http://www.hotwaxmedia.com
o:801.649.6594
f:801.649.6595
Al Byers wrote:
I would like to see discussion about testing kept alive, so I have
taken the unprecedented step of doing some investigation on my own -
but not much; I am counting on the community picking this up and
helping us get to a useful OFBiz standard solution.
As I learn more, I see that the capture/playback mode of Grinder is
very limited. The next step up seems to be WebTest with its ability to
script tests. WebTest, essentially, emulates a browser and looks like
it would be very eary to use - especially for acceptance testing.
Grinder may be a better tool for performance testing.
Selenium goes one step further and, instead of emulating a browser, it
installs a Javascript shell in the browser (after it starts the
browser automatically from the selenium server) and receives requests
from the server (request that you send to the server, either
interactively or via scripts), causes the browser, itself, to execute
those requests, thereby testing the web application under test.
There seems to be much more to getting a selenium environment working,
but it would appear that the testing would be more rigourous. This is
where the size of the OFBiz community should help. Whereas, it may not
be cost-effective for one party to get selenium working for their own
use, we should be able to tap into the experience of the entire
community to get a ready cookbook for setting up selenium and for
writing tests for various standard modules. Also, there would be many
reusable subtest and techniques that could be shared.
It would seem that Selenium would be the way to go as OFBiz interfaces
start using more AJAX interactions - because it uses actual browsers
to run the tests.
Of course, I am getting ahead of myself - annointing a winner before
there has been a consensus.
Anyone have some experience/s to share?
-Al
