We are testing a DSL modem's web pages (the HTTP server is running on the modem).
We have an automation tool that configures various options on the web pages by sending
POSTS of the respective web pages
We are using TCL (HTTP package) to send POST data on the web pages .
My questions:
Is there a faster way to do this other than TCL ?
When POST method of certain web page changes then the automation code has to be re-written .
Is there a way to write a generic code in some language so that the tool works irrespective of changes in POST or web structure?
If not, What is simple and fastest way to do implement and maintain the automation tool ?
Please suggest programming language.
It will be great if someone can share their ideas.
Regards,
Mithun
Python + web2py
All in one package with no further dependencies. Development, deployment, debugging, testing, database administration and maintenance of applications can be done via the provided web interface. web2py has no configuration files, requires no installation, can be run off a USB drive. web2py uses Python for the Model, the Views and the Controllers, has a built-in ticketing system to manage errors, an internationalization engine, works with MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite , Oracle, MSSQL and the Google App Engine via an ORM abstraction layer. web2py includes libraries to handle HTML/XML, RSS, ATOM, CSV, RTF, JSON, AJAX, XMLRPC, WIKI markup. Production ready, capable of upload/download of very large files, and always backward compatible.
Text from python wiki
I am not sure I understand what you are asking, but for testing web frontends, you can use Selenium. And for your backend, you can use PHPUnit. They also work together.
You will have to adjust your tests when your application changes. You run your tests against an interface. When that changes, your tests will have to change.
Selenium is definitely a good option and would be my personal choice.
It can be used on several languages. It is mostly a matter of taste and how familiar you are with the language.
If you do not know any of the ones proposed, I would recommend python or ruby but once again, it a matter of taste.
Selenium can and is meant to indeed be included in an unit tests suite, which is usually bound to the language (JUnit in Java, NUnit for .Net, unittest for python etc.).
Another option is the testing module form Visual Studio 2010, which is very nice and I think , offers this kind of features plus a lot of other ones too (but comes with a cost! and runs on Windows only).
Related
I'm trying to build a full test suite for Joomla and others. There are some docs around but they're quite limited and I'm wondering somebody did wrote already some scripts. By 'full' I do mean really a complete testing :
1. installing an extension on Windows, Max, Linux (Vagrant, VM)
2. configuring the extensions with the CMS option panels
3. doing things in a full Ajax application
I guess I'll end up with lots of bash-scripts, triggering other scripts within a virtual setup, right ?
I must admit, I am not really familiar with all this testing frameworks and products and I'd be already very happy to get pointed to anything. Doing pure unit tests doesn't seem enough given the nature of such systems (namespace collision, interfering plugins,...)
Thank you for any hints
I am not familiar with wordpress and joomla but those are just PHP code, so using PHPUnit can be suitable. With PHPUnit you are not only doing unit testing but you can also do other kinds of tests (it depends on how much time you are willing to spend on testing but I would say that it can cover pretty much any aspects)
As for front-end testing, there are several choices
Using selenium to write tests
Using one of the many headless testing frameworks out there (for instance, casperjs in Javascript, Watir for Ruby etc...)
For setting up virtual environment, apart from vagrant you can check docker
There are many programs you can use to do the normal interaction tests; if you want to handle logins, some scripting will be necessary to grab the token.
But for a full integration test including ajax I guess you'd be better off with a headless browser, take a look at this Real headless browser where the same requirement is discussed in detail
For a while now, I've been thinking about the question of user interface, with regard to ease of implementation and cross-platform compatibility. I'm primarily interested in developing desktop applications, for things that don't have a server-side storage model, or situations where internet connectivity is intermittent, etc. However, I've started doing some work on my employer's website, and found in that time that web site interfaces are very easy to develop, especially in comparison with the cross-platform UI tools I've used in the past.
With that in mind, I want to know: what are the tools/libraries available that can be integrated into a desktop application to render web content? Could be HTML, PHP, JavaScript, with/without CSS, etc. How easy/difficult are they to use?
You might actually want to check out Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation. It takes a lot from how the web works and applies it to desktop application development. It's not exactly HTML/CSS/PHP/JS, but it's not far off, either. It does have a bit of a learning curve, but the markup is XML based, so it's largely just a matter of learning its quirks, and of course, the .Net languages and framework (though, theoretically, you could use PHP on the .Net framework).
You might also be interested in Appcelerator Titanium, which allows you to use HTML/CSS/JS to build desktop applications. I don't know what it's desktop development is like, but I've used it for iPhone development, and it has promise.
If you want to play around with plugin/extension writing, the latest Gnome desktop environment (Gnome 3 - http://www.gnome.org/) actually runs completely off of HTML/CSS/JS and could use people to help build their extension library. It is, literally, writing desktop apps! :) (You would, of course, have to run Linux to play with it, but Fedora 15 uses Gnome 3 by default, and Linux in general comes with a number of powerful text editors, and the community has done a great job writing tutorials and documentations for getting started.)
If I understand the question right, to my knowledge there is nothing truly cross platform for doing this, you would always have to write a different version for each target platform.
Most windows apps that render web content sub the task out to IE, but I don't know how *nix app would handle this.
To use PHP to do anything on the local machine, it would have to be installed on the local machine. You can supposedly build full Windows GUIs in PHP with Winbinder although I have never messed around with it myself.
For windows-only apps, you might find HTA interesting - these are (sort of) self-contained HTML/Jscript apps and you can use links and Jscript to fetch content from remote servers.
I think your best bet would be Java though - the Java mantra is 'Write once, run anywhere' and Java GUIs are extremely portable. I'm sure I remember coming across something whereby you could use HTML to build bits of a Swing GUI as well...
What about Adobe Air? I'm not caught up on its capabilities, but I run Pandora Desktop on my Mac, which goes through Adobe Air - My impression was that it fulfills what the OP is asking.
You should have a look at Adobe AIR:
Adobe AIR with PHP/MySql or SQLite
http://www.vtc.com/products/Adobe-AIR-PHP-Development-Tutorials.htm
Never used it though so I can't really give you details but maybe somebody who has can... hope this helps
I'm looking to develop a Win32 desktop app - a one off, for a personal need. A GUI is not scrictly needed, though would be a bonus.
What is needed:
The ability to monitor the window title of a specific window.
The ability to run DOS commands when this window title changes.
I hope my programming ability is up to this - I feel I'm pretty good with PHP, but I'm not ready to spend time learning OO for this one-off project.
What non OO (or at least not mandatorily OO) languages are there for desktop apps that might be suitable for a beginner on a task like?
Any other, more hacky approaches are welcome too - batch scripts etc.
Many thanks for any advice,
Jack
Whether or not the language supports OO doesn't really matter for your purposes. After all, PHP supports objects and you seem to do just fine with it.
Personally, i'd recommend Java or C# to get started with. The communities for these two languages are huge and there are plenty of tutorials online to help you get started.
It's extremely easy to get starting writing C# with Visual Studio Express. And a good hello world tutorial.
Also, if you stick with C# you can take advantage of WMI which will allow you to do everything you need for this project (and much much more).
Lastly, most windows machines will be able to run your application without having to install anything extra and Visual Studio builds the .exe for you as part of the build process.
You can use PHP for desktop apps if you really want to. Just install the php CLI.
You can even do a gui for your desktop app in php: http://gtk.php.net/
EDIT: I'm not sure how easily you can call win32 api functions from PHP, however. There look to be a few articles about this online and a SO question: How to call winapi functions from PHP?
I would vote for Python using the included TkInter module for GUI. Dead simple to use.
Widgets aren't the prettiest looking, but development is rapid.
EDIT: I mistook "non-OO" in the question for "OO". Python is most definitely not "non-OO", but but is very well suited to doing what you asked.
You could write this in pretty much any mainstream language supported by Windows. C or C++ are obvious choices. C# and Visual Basic .NET are going to require the .NET Framework ... not a bad thing, but perhaps more than you want to tackle for a simple project. Come to think of it, you might be able to do this with JScript or VBScript, although I'm not clear on what API functions you have easy access to. And I have to believe that it's possible to do with PowerShell with just a little work.
Your options are wide open.
F#
It's an awesome piece of work, has access to the Framework class libraries, supports GUI development, really easy parallel programming, compiles to IL (same as C#) but has a really concise functional syntax.
I've recently started a new web development project for an embedded device and wanted to solicit some recommendations for technologies to use. The device will serve HTML pages which include AJAX code to retrieve data from a JSON server. We're tentatively using Cherokee as the web server, though we're not tied to it.
Currently, I'm considering the following technologies:
Write it all in PHP. I know it's big, slow, and bloated, but I've got about 10MB available for the web interface (a lot for an embedded system), and we won't be seeing a lot of traffic on any of these devices. It does need to seem responsive for the users, however (pages should load in less than a second).
FastCGI + a C program - We're using an in-memory database, so the C program could interact with the database directly through the API. This would have much better performance than PHP, but development time and reliability is a concern since C isn't very well-suited for web development.
Lua + Kepler - This seems like a nice middle ground between performance and development time. However, I've never worked with Lua, so I'm not really sure how to implement it in an embedded web project. I'm also uncertain as to how well it integrates with the Cherokee web server.
So any opinions or past experiences with the above stated technologies? Any others I should include in the list?
Thanks,
Alex
When I was in this area, I used Lua and a simple FastCGI runner (Luaetta [for I'm sure the latest source would be available if you asked the guy] , though I'm also sure that's not the only one, and there's Kepler of course), spawned by lighttpd.
It performed quite well on an embedded media player, and was used for remotely accessing content and controlling the device. Though I don't maintain it anymore, you can find more about it at http://matthewwild.co.uk/projects/wooble . If you think the source would help just poke me for it, it's currently only available via a package manager but I can fix that given the motivation.
Another (again Lua) project in this area is LuCI. These guys are dedicated to making a web interface for embedded devices (routers specifically), and have produced a nice framework with lots of supporting libraries geared towards that kind of system.
I wouldn't be concerned with not knowing Lua. If you know any language then you can pick up Lua in a day or two, the manual documents the whole language and is quite short.
How about looking at HipHop, Facebook's PHP compiler?
https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki
That way you can write your code in PHP and effectively compile it to C++.
ASP.NET. Assuming that you wouldn't be interested in Embedded Windows Server 2008, you could still leverage ASP.NET by incorporating Mono into Cherokee. You could leverage Visual Studio as your RAD development environment and use things like ASP.NET MVC 2. A lot of third party user controls will also 'just work' with Mono (Telerik Announces Support for their ASP.NET controls on Mono!).
I have an idea for a product that I want to be web-based. But because I live in a part of the world where the internet is not always available, there needs to be a client desktop component that is available for when the internet is down. Also, I have been a SQL programmer, a desktop application programmer using dBase, VB and Pascal, and I have created simple websites using HTML and website creation tools, such as Frontpage.
So from my research, I think I have the following options; PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python or .NET for the programming side. MySQL for the DB. And Apache, or possibly IIS, for the webserver.
I will probably start with a local ISP provider for the cloud servce. But then maybe move to something more "robust" and universal in the future, ie. Amazon, or Azure, or something along that line.
My question then is this. What would you recommend for something like this? I'm sure that I have not listed all of the possibilities, but the ones I have researched and thought of.
Thanks everyone,
Craig
If you want a 'desktop component' that is available for you to do development on whenever your internet is out, you could really choose any of those technologies. You can always have a local server (like apache) running on your machine, as well as a local sql database, though if your database contains a large amount of data you may need to scale it down.
Ruby on Rails may be the easiest for you to get started with, though, since it comes packaged with WEBrick (a ruby library that provides HTTP services), and SQLite, a lightweight SQL database management system. Ruby on Rails is configured by default to use these.
The languages you list are all serverside components. The big question is whether you can sensibly build a thick client - effectively you could develop a multi-tier application where the webserver sits on the client and uses a webservice as a datafeed if/when its available but the solution is not very portable.
You could build a purely ajax driven website in javascript then deploy it to the client as signed javascripts on the local filesystem (they need to be signed to get around the restriction that javscripts can only connect back to the server where they served from normally).
Another approach would be to use Google Gears - but that would be a single browser solution.
C.
If you wan't to run a version of the server on desktops, your best options would be Python, Rails, or Java servlets, all of which can be easily packaged into small self contained servers with no dependencies.
My recommendation for the desktop would be HTML 5 local storage. The standard hasn't been finalized, but there is experimental support in Google Chrome. If you can force your users to use a specific browser version, you should be OK, until it is finalized.
I would recommend looking at Django and Rails before any other framework. They have different design philosophies, so one of them might be better suited for your application. Another framework to consider is Grails, which is essentially a clone of Rails in the groovy language.