From: djberg96@... (Daniel Berger)
Date: 2004-05-22T14:03:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Web GUI Testing (Re: How to duck type? - the psychology of static typing in Ruby)

James Britt <jamesUNDERBARb@neurogami.com> wrote in message news:<40AC08AD.5020801@neurogami.com>...
> Hal Fulton wrote:
> > UI is often hard, especially GUI.
> > 
> > But I ran into an idea the other day that I was unfamiliar with.
> > 
> > 'Expect' is sometimes used to wrap a GUI around a text interface --
> > spawn the process and interact with it.
> > 
> > Of course, that in itself is non-trivial perhaps.
> > 
> > But a text interface is easier to test, especially with Expect.
> 
> I've been using Ruby at my current job to test a web app via Internet 
> Explorer with the clIEController [0].
> 
> The downside is it only scripts IE, and (to the best of my knowledge), 
> you cannot get to the raw markup returned to the scripted browser, so it 
> doesn't help you verify, for example, that each page is rendered as you 
> expect.
> 
> I've hacked some code for the controller that walks the IE HTML node 
> tree and emits proper XML (not actual XHTML, though) so that one can run 
> xpath calls, via REXML, against the markup to see that certain data is 
> on the page, or check that a page fetch didn't return an error page.
> 
> If nothing else, it saves *much* time clicking through pages, filling in 
> forms, clicking submit, etc.  My test script will spawn a score of 
> threads; browsers pop up all over the place, and I test a dozen 
> pages/site paths at a time.
> 
> 
> James
> 
> [0] http://www.clabs.org/wtr/index.cgi?page=/ClIEController

Dunno if it's relavent, but perhaps a port of Perl's WWW::Mechanize
module is in order.

Regards,

Dan