Archive for January, 2007
January 30, 2007 at 9:04 pm · tags: Selenium Testing
I just finished writing a bunch of tests with Selenium-IDE to test our UI and I feel good. While playing with Selenium-IDE you feel a pleasing sensation because it’s just the one you’re looking for.
Selenium-IDE is distributed as a simple extension to our beloved browser. After the installation you can open the program in the Tools menu and this nice interface pops up:
You can then press the red button on the right side and… that’s it! Simply click on the website you want to test and Selenium-IDE will record all your steps filling the main interface step by step.
You can playback the test case with the play button, edit using the built-in mini-DSL and then save all in HTML for a later click-and-run session. There’s something more (like the test runner) in Selenium-IDE that can help augmenting your testing experience but I’ll let it discover to you 
I sadly discarded Sahi right now. Altough it seems nice it needs a separate Java daemon and the modding of the Proxy settings of the browser.
January 29, 2007 at 12:54 pm · tags: Django Python Selenium Testing
This morning I poked around the Django testing framework and altough is definitely usable as a simple testing framework (unittest and doctest) it lacks a massive fixture framework (like Rails for instance).
I also have some random problems using test.Client() for POST resulting in some HTTP 500 response instead of 200.
In the meantime I tried using twill to fulfill the holes in the testing infrastructure but it seems to be useless for our web app because the forms use an image to submit and twill understands only submit buttons.
The solution seems to be Selenium. It’s handy and powerful. I can test visually without have to remember line by line in which state am I and go back and forth from Firebug to TextMate to see what name has the view I have to check after. I’m not done testing with Selenium but I like it. It also produces Python source code I can integrate with the app.
January 26, 2007 at 3:35 am · tags: Misc Python
I kinda like the new interface but I just found an annoying flaw in the application preventing me to reach the single NNTP messages.
As an example try go on the it.comp.lang.python newsgroup and search for author:Alex bagel. This query is supposed to retrieve a wonderful post Alex Martelli made about his life in Google but when you click on the link you have some random page without the content you are searching for.
That seems bad to me.
January 20, 2007 at 2:26 pm · tags: DotNET Misc Python Ruby Web
Tim O’Reilly published his analysis about the market of computer books’ sales.
With this kinds of trends you can have a feeling about what leads in the market categories and what doesn’t.
I’m not surprised seeing Ruby (+53%) ahead of Python (+37%) and Perl (-21%), nor to see how books about the web design and development are on the edge. What surprised me most is seeing a +106% regarding SQL Server (!!)… it should be connected to the spread of .NET (that has surpassed Java).
Nice to hear Mac OSX books sale is the only positive trend
January 13, 2007 at 11:35 am · tags: Web
Firebug is a very good piece of software, and that’s not a common thing. So thanks Joe for coding and releasing it as opensource.
This is really the best tool every web developer should ask for!
