How to install different versions of IE, without using Virtual PCs.
Is there any simulators ... ??
The answer is to use VMs. Even if that's not the answer you want to hear, that is the answer.
Running (some of) them on the same machine is just about possible, but you shouldn't do it, because they rely on external components, which you also can't have multiple versions of, so yes, you'll end up with (for example) IE6 running alongside other versions, but it will not be the same as the IE6 you started with. In particular, the activeX components are suceptible to this, so if your site uses any filter styles for example, you may get unexpected side effects.
The only reason you'd want multiple versions of IE is for testing purposes, but the above should be enough to prove that even if you do achieve it, it won't give you valid tests.
So we go back to the original point, which is to use a VM.
You can use IETester (http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage) This works quite nicely for testing multiple versions of IE.
Related
I develop asterisk and GUI.
Asterisk GUI were exist several type.
FreePBX, AsteriskNOW, Elastix, Trixbox...
Finally, I have selected two type.
FreePBX and AsteriskNOW.
FreePBX is based on php, AsteriskNOW is based on java.
Almost people used FreePBX.
But I don't know that reason.
I have installed AsteriskNOW and asterisk from command line (apt-get install asterisk) to get the best and easiest startup time. All other versions are a pain in the a$$. I would go for apt-get install asterisk since this way takes care of upgrades.
Your question is valid, since there are very few forums and people who can / do help on asterisk. Any question on asterisk deserves a +1.
I have been using Asterisk for about ~10 years, and always compiled from source and always used CLI. Its simple, flexible, easy to maintain and "solid". For a brief period of time, I used Trixbox. It was nice and shiny for a while, with all the bells and whistles from an "out of the box" distro. But it wasn't long when the thing broke down. I don't know if it was my careless edit or something spooky, but it stopped working. As an emergency repair, I simply re-installed asterisk from source as usual (1.4 that time), using my own handcrafted config files. This setup is still in server as of Today (Sep 5, 2014).
just recently tried 'pbxinaflash' with 'incrediblepbx', mostly because of security ('fail2ban') and to try some other interesting features (such as google voice, and other call routings). Quickly after the installation, I got locked out by fail2ban firewall when I typed incorrect password twice. Finally when I reached the GUI, it looked good (as expected). Struggled with GUI menus for several hours to get some functionality to work. Finally had to resort to editing custom.conf files to get most of stuff in my .conf files replicated. Still was not able to setup trunk. Removed it in frustration. (Oh, the 'pbxinaflash' has lots hidden paid features that are installed on trial basis).
The main issue I have with all the GUIs is that they take control of your .conf files, splitting them into multiple sub files, and allow you to edit only a few of them. This hides a lot of simple stuff under multiple GUI menus. e.g if you need to enable tcp, you would need to edit 3 lines in sip.conf in raw asterisk. On GUI, that needs visiting about 2 menus and editing a config file. My ideal GUI would co-exist with plain .conf files, seamlessly co-existing with manual edits, and still allow easy GUI for things where GUI is really needed, such as call routing etc.
Anyway, I am now trying FreePBX and AsteriskNOW (both use same GUI), while my good old asterisk 1.4 is still quietly doing its job close by.
If anyone is interested I can post more updates.
Current Asterisk NOW(binary distro) use freepbx.org (web framework for asterisk control).
So your question have no real sence or choice.
Older asterisk now(javascript) now not supported and very buggy. Better not use that.
Elastix, Trixbox, PBX in a Flash(icnredible pbx) all different binary distros based on Freepbx.org
Freepbx is not best web in term of architecture, but it most common and stable.
If you question is which distro to use as base for your setup - use PBX in Flash or Elastix.
If you want DEVELOP web, you need have 5+ years extensive asterisk experience to do that.
You can try XiVO. It's based on Asterisk and distributed under the GPLv3 license
Now to test the websites I use multiple virtual machines (VirtualBox) with Web browsers.
I want to make portable versions of browsers (to collect IE, Opera, Safari, FF, Chrome and maybe another). I want that browser have development tool (e.g. like Firebug).
For virtualization apps I found several solutions:
BoxedApp
Cameyo
JauntePE
Spoon Studio / Xenocode Virtual Application Studio
VMware ThinApp
MoleBox Virtualization Solution
Tell me what there are and what should I choose for my task?
As far as I know, if to use boxedapp, your an application will run properly even if it doesn't have the right to write to the system registry.
I personally use VMWare Workstation. It has never given me problems. I'd recommend it.
In terms of what there is available out there, there is a ridiculous amount of programs to choose from.
There are my two cents! Hope this helps and good luck!
Can you please clarify what you are asking?
The assumption made by Jebego, and my understanding of your question, is that you are interesting in finding out what different Virtualization tools are available, though your comment:
I want to assemble a collection of browsers for testing as portable application. In addition to its main functions I want to be able to see html \ css \ js or something like Firebug.
Is slightly misleading as it refers to browsers.
Other useful information you may want to include is the size of your budget. You mention that you are currently using VirtualBox, which is Open Source, so I am assuming you ideally are looking for products which are free.
Anyway assuming my assumptions are correct, I can give details on a couple of options which I have experience with:
Micsoroft Virtual PC - I found Microsoft Virtual PC easy to set up and get started with. It is a free download, and if you have Windows 7 installed then I believe it is built into the OS. If you're looking for seomthing fairly basic, simply to run your application in a browser for testing purposes then this may be sufficient. Virtual PC allows you to allocate a specfic amount of RAM to each VM, but you cannot go over 3,712MB, which is pretty limiting if you need to do anything requiring significant resources inside the VM.
VMWare Server - I recently moved to VMWare Server 2.0, also a free product. I use a virtual machine for development tasks, and found that the RAM limit on Virtual PC was too low to run the developer tools and add-ins at a suitable speed. With VMWare Server, you can allocate as much RAM as you see fit (obviously you need to have it available in the host machine), and you can also specify the number of CPUs to allocate to the VM. The setup is slightly less starightforward than Virtual PC, but by no means complicated. The tools provided by VMWare offer more configuration options (such as those mentioned above).
This is a brief summary of my experience, I'd be happy to give more detail on either if you so require.
Some general things to bear in mind when choosing virtualisation software:
What OS do you plan to install on the guest? Some Virtualisation software is better suited to specific OS'es
How much poower do you need inside your guest VM? Again, this will influence your decision on which way to go.
Hope this helped, good luck with your search.
So I'm trying to get an environment set up that acts like a selenium grid in that:
1) It runs the tests in parallel across a distributed set of clients
2) I can specify tests to run on specific clients (which are running on different OS's, with different browsers), or tests to run once on all the clients or any combination thereof.
The problem is that capybara actually currently uses WebDriver, not selenium, so as far as I know I can't specify a selenium grid for the tests to hook up to and have it work.
I've looked into things such as DeepTest and Testjour, but neither scratches both itches above. I'd love for there to be a way I can tag a cucumber feature with what browsers I want it run on, and it just does it, like selenium grid currently does. Is there an easy way I can do this without a lot of hackery on my part, or do I need to wait for Selenium 2 to be released?
Oh and I should add I've love to keep capybara's ability to swap out web drivers at will - running on selenium (or WebDriver I guess I should say), htmlunit, etc.
There is currently a version of grid for webdriver under development.
You can find info about it here
So one potential solution I'm digging into here is Hydra. It seems to work for parallel execution of cucumber scenarios across multiple machines simply using ssh, thus scratching itch #1 above. I've set it up and have it running properly on two macs and a windows VM, and things are running smoothly. However, itch #2 remains unscratched. So I forked it, and my first pass is to simply set up a way to run all features on all machines in a parallel manner, ensuring that all features get tested on every supported browser we have. My next pass may be to hack in a way to to be able to specify which features run on which machines, if time permits and the need is great enough. We'll see how it goes.
In the interest of browser-compatibility checking, and given limited resources, is it worthwhile to test my HTML 4/CSS 2 web applications and sites with older versions of Firefox, or is it sufficient to test with the current version (v3.6 as at the time of writing)?
If I need to test against older versions, why? What are the things that I need to look out for?
UPDATE 1: This applies to a generally available audience and we can assume the browser usage patterns are the same as for the general public.
As a general rule, test your application in as many different environments as you can. It's never a BAD idea to test it against an older version of a browser.
Of course, given time limits and realistic requirements, you may want to limit the scope of your tests. For example, unless you're creating an application for the government, you usually won't need to test anything below Internet Explorer 6.
As for Firefox, the 2.x release was when it started to become really popular. It's easy to imagine that there are many people out there still on Firefox 2.x. The main thing you need to watch out for is differences with the way CSS is handled. Older browsers may render certain CSS tags differently or just plain don't have support for some of them.
I usually do check in older browsers, and follow this list http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/ of A grade browsers. Unless it's just a very quick site I test in all A Grade Browsers.
The main reason to check different browsers is to make sure that the different users get the same experience and that your site actually works. Some obvious things are css fixes, javascript / ajax fixes, or things not working, PNG transparencies not working in IE6 and so on.
As said before, you need to know your demographics and what the site is used for. If it's an internal site, or one where only a limited people have access to it, and you know they don't use IE 7 or lower, or the older versions of Firefox, then there is really no need to cross check. But I'd say for the general public websites, stick with A grade browsers and you're pretty good.
If you want to test with a lot of different browsers, this free service might be helpful for you:
http://browsershots.org/
(Adobe had a commercial service in the past, but they shut it down in 2013.)
If a significant fraction of your intended audience use the old versions, yes.
Is this a generally available application, or will it be restricted to one organisation? If the latter, then the corporate policies on browser support will determine this.
First, find out what the browser demographics to your site are like.
That should drive any compatibility testing.
If you find that you have many users with older versions of Firefox, then it would be worthwhile.
You might find out that some other browser you had not considered should be a focus.
Good question!
If your application targets less tech-savvy people, I'd say a basic test against 2 is still mandatory. I've seen plenty of machines still running 2 because of turned off auto-updates and such.
I'm putting together some virtual machines to test different browsers and I'm wondering if there is any compelling reason to be able to test the same version of IE on different versions of Windows. (i.e. IE8 on XP and Vista) I'm mostly talking about testing CSS to make sure it "looks right" across browsers, but if there were major differences in JavaScript I would want to know that too.
Are different versions of IE "generally the same" on different versions of Windows? Thanks!
The time and cost of testing different versions of windows would be better spent in other places. This would be one of the last things I would look at when looking for rendering issues.
I agree with both people who have answered previously, despite the fact that they disagree with one another.
In general, IE will act very largely the same across all versions of windows. However, there can be (and are) some occassional subtle differences. Whether these are important are not is up to you.
For the great majority of websites, I wouldn't bother with it. But for very precise web applications where you're using something like complex javascript, or if you require layout to be correct to the pixel for some reason, then it could be worth it. I'm thinking of cases where people are generating os-type applications in JavaScript where the DOM is really being pushed around, and where exact layout and flawless event-handling is critical.
Yes, I am currently testing something out and have varying results between XP and Vista.
--assuming you already have both platforms.
No, I would stick to testing on the current (IE8) and previous (IE7), unless it is a requirement to support older versions. These browsers should render the same across different versions of windows.
I personally dont bother with IE6, the sooner that is gone, the better
I would think there would be very limited cases where you'll notice a difference in IE between Windows versions. One example where you would is a Google toolbar bug I've seen in IE6 that renders html forms unusable. That bug seems to go away when you upgrade to IE8. But that problem is more Google Toolbar than IE.
Other differences you run into may be security or plug-in related. But in the default IE configurations I don't think you'll see any differences in rendering.