The quest for the difference begins

Selenium Core, Selenium RC, Watir, FireWatir, SafariWatir, MineralWatir, Selenium IDE, TestGen4Web. These are all tools related to doing functional testing of web applications. The first six are concerned with providing an API for driving the browser like a user would. The latter 2 record user actions and output code to reproduce them.

Problem is: each has very, very little documentation. And what exists is severely outdated. You can’t tell one from the other.

I’ll start digging up stuff and posting here to keep my findings in one place.

This presentation sheds a bit of light on the differences in architecture between the various Selenia. It’d be great to find the contents of the presentation besides the slides.

Summer of Code All-nighters

After about a week of digging up stuff on Free Software projects, subscribing to a dozen mailing lists, emailing developers, reading documentation, waiting for feedback, thinking up proposals, twisting and changing them, confronting them wih my own limitations and interests, I finally gave birth to two applications for the Google Summer of Code, one for Ruby Central and the other for Eclipse. Below are the abstracts:

The Ruby Central application:

This project aims at allowing users to record normal usage on a website and then have a script generated that can reproduce such actions.

This script is generated in Ruby and can be changed and mixed with existing Ruby code to extend its behaviour, using regular Ruby variables, loop constructs, etc.

A parser is going to be built for Firefox logs of user-activity (extracted by existing free software extensions) with the ability to generate code for the browser-driving tool FireWatir.

The Eclipse application:

Ruby has a fast-growing community which has not yet settled for one particular
editor/IDE and still has ongoing debates on that topic. It has not found a home
yet.

The ability to change one’s surroundings and make it more confortable for daily
usage by implementing helpers appropriate to one’s specific needs is crucial in
having this feeling of acquaintance and familiarity with a tool.

Unfortunately, the barrier of entry into Eclipse plug-in development for Ruby
users is still pretty high, as few are as skilled in Java as they are in Ruby.

This project aims to bridge that gap by allowing Eclipse plug-ins (or a subset
of the possible ones) to be develop entirely in Ruby.

This last one was written on a rush and with almost no previous research so it’s not very well-finished. I’m open to any ideas and suggestions on either one.