I have to say, I am loving the Pharo/Seaside development environment. Manually testing TFLogin (a basic login and user account management package for Seaside) using Firefox was taking longer and longer as added features multiplied the number of cases to be tested. I had unit tests for the underlying pieces; testing the callbacks on the rendered pages was where most of my time was being spent.
Yesterday I loaded WebClient and Soup from Squeaksource and together they made it possible for me to script tests of the TFLogin Web UI without needing a browser. This even includes verifying confirmation email callbacks. I've constructed web apps in other environments (e.g. LAMP, ASP) and never had this level of automated testing. Its surely not impossible in other development environments, but somehow it never happened. I've been thinking about why in the Pharo/Seaside environment this seemed so natural and I've come up with these reasons: 1. It required no extra infrastructure or products to set up the test environment. Seaside's server, the WebClient clients, Soup, and the TFLogin test app are all present in the Pharo image. 2. No shell scripts or Perl or Python code was necessary. 3. The tests cases are integrated into the development environment, and are not in another tool or language. Regards, TF
