On Thu, 2002-06-06 at 20:10, A. Keyton Weissinger wrote: > CASE FOR SCRIPT > 1) Until such time as I have a GUI, all users will likely be developers (as > most QA folks don't have time to write code to do tests -- at least like > this). > 2) I want to help developers. (I'm a developer. Lord knows, I need help. > ;-)). > 3) I am a Python coder and want to further Python. > > As you can see, this isn't cut in stone. For the record, I've had many a > Perl enthusiast suggest the same thing from the Perl side of the great wall. > Heck, I've even had some VB-slaves grunt similar comments. > > So the need for a traditional scripting-based format seems to be a very > important concept to developers. On the other hand, I can only get a handful > of truly hardcore QA folks to mess with it, because they'd just as soon > concentrate on the testing and not on writing anything like this (XML or > script). > > So it comes down to this: How can I best (and most quickly) meet the needs > of my number 1 audience (QA engineers) while continuing to help (and receive > AWESOME feedback like this) from developers? > > One Thought: > A script to turn your Python (/Perl/VBScript/JavaScript) version into my > XML?
I'm not sure exactly what you're thinking, but I think that's too hard -- converting languages is a Hard Problem, and certainly this does not warrant looking for Hard Problems. Anyone could use an alternate syntax that can be converted to XML -- I think Zebra offers a decent one, for instance (Python, too, I think). You could integrate it (basically run the preprocessor automatically), and that would be very easy. I expect it would be very little maintenance, as XML is not going to change anytime soon, so if your preprocessor works now it'll work forever. However, I think it should be possible to do this fairly easily with Python -- maybe not presenting a fully Pythonic scripting interface, but at least constructing the definition with Python instead of XML. Whatever you do, you end up creating some Python datastructure for the XML. Making the Python interface could be as easy as providing a module that creates those datastructures directly in Python. Or the Python could just create XML. I suppose at that point it might not be much harder, but by providing an interface that presents the allowed XML more naturally it would be easier. Then I suppose all languages would be peers. Ian _______________________________________________________________ Don't miss the 2002 Sprint PCS Application Developer's Conference August 25-28 in Las Vegas -- http://devcon.sprintpcs.com/adp/index.cfm _______________________________________________ Webware-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/webware-discuss
