There’s some really expensive packages out there for automated website testing. These things cost thousands of dollars, usually only run on windows, and are huge bloated software packages. There great for your average QA person to quickly “record” a web session and play it back later.
But developers have different needs than QA folk, and we’d like to do automated tests as well. My requirements are as follows:
1) Cross platform (windows, osx, linux, more is nice)
2) Allows me to simulate all types of requests to a web server / service.
3) Can be integrated into ant for completely hands-off testing.
4) Can verify any element of a page.
The package I’ve been using for this is called Hatatap.
It allows you to construct o-xml programs that easily fulfill all of my requirements. o-xml is an object orientated programing language that’s written entirely in XML. If you have a good XML editor that understands XML schemas, than you get all the nice context sensitive completion you expect from a modern development environment.
Last night I spent some time updating my long-neglected personal websites.
Rogue Development - The “dumping ground” for any interesting projects I work on.
http://www.rogue-development.com/
This site is kind of neat. It consists solely of XML and XSLT documents. The XML is transformed by the XSLT on the client side (so it only works in semi-modern browsers) and is formatted by a css stylesheet. If I had cared about supporting more browsers, I could have done the XSLT conversion on the server side, but I don’t. You can view-source on any page to see the XML, and you can check out these links for the XSLT and css pages:
CSS
XSLT
You’re free to use them, modify them, etc on your site if you wish, just drop me a note letting me know. I like to see what other people do.
Someday, I might write a Flex interface for reading the XML content. Or even better, I wonder if it’s relatively easy to create a flex app to author the XSLT documents.
Marc-Hughes.com - My personal “fun” website.
http://www.marc-hughes.com/
The front page is flash, but the rest of the site is the same XSLT as rogue-development with a different css sheet to format it.