Is there a way to test Comet applications without a running browser? - ruby

I'm trying to connect to an application that uses Comet and is pretty heavy on Javascript and Comet. I've gone as far as I can go in Firebug, HTTP Header examination and am trying to see what's coming over the wire by writing something using Ruby Mechanize.
However, since I have no client run-time, my approach is to mimic the HTTP requests going back and forth (doing this using Ruby Mechanize). I'm looking at the logs and comparing them to LiveHTTPHeader output and it's very similar but the server isn't responding (I don't have access to the server side code).
Are there tools that could help? Has anyone tried simulating the DOM and Javascript runtime using something like Rhino or is that just asking for pain?

The only sane way I've found to run automated tests on web apps involving substantial Javascript (w/ or w/o Comet) is selenium rc -- basically, mechanizing/automating a real browser from your favorite programming language. (There may be other approaches with a similar architecture, but Selenium is popular and it's what I'm familiar with). Simulating browser's DOM and JS is just too painful -- been there, tried that, failed miserably;-).

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate edition provides very good testing support for web applications. I had tried the web load test and it was impressing.

Related

Testing VXML Applications in a Application Simulator

I am looking for a solution to simulate vxml application in a desktop/web browser.
Challenge
i have few hundreds of unit test cases in every new vxml application development.
it is not possible to always make a test call to test every single unit test cases i have. if i can test vxml application in a simulator it will be more easy to test it..
i am aware of that avaya Dialog designer/AAOD have a feature to test application in their inbuild Application simulator which comes with AAOD/DD Eclipse package but this tool can run AAOD/DD projects in workspace alone.
Please refer : Chapter 16 in Avaya dev guide
AAOD's Tool looks like this
is it possible to customize to use this tool to simulate static VXML / Nuance NDF based VXML application ?
or any other tools available ?
Unit testing of IVR applications is challenging and it is near impossible to hit ever possible path in the call flow for an application of any size. I am not aware if you can customize Avaya's tool for your needs. But there is a product out there that may fit some of your requirements. It is Voiyager by Syntellect. It looks like they have a free trial now if you want to try it out. I saw a demonstration of it at SpeechTEK a few years ago and it was pretty impressive. The only reason I did not pursue it at the time is that it was pretty pricey.
Avaya od/dd is a platform dependent tool(IDE) where you can create (vxml+java), test and debug application in the tool. But code which is created outside(Avaya OD/DD tool) the environment is not possible. Because code generated in avaya OD is java format, while executing in the voice browser it is converted into vxml for that u need to give webLM a license to avaya tool.You can use some ivr automation tools like hammer etc.But you need to pay for the software.
VXML apps are just WARs. The only session information transferred between invocations of pages is the session id. We have used Apache JMeter to create apps.
What you can do it try and see if what you want to do can be done via the web browser, by going to http://<server>/<Application/Start there fill the boxes you require (most of the time just filling the ones marked ANI and DNIS will be enough). If your call can be tested this way you can use the tools for web testing, without using Orchestration Designer.
If your app has a CTI/AES connector you may not be able to do this, because the web server tries to connect to AES upon submitting the first page.
As stated above , there are things that cannot be unit tested .
Nuance NDF and SVF applications come with test pages where you can simulate the call flow ; similar tools exit for grammars .

Node.js for "traditional" sites

I'm digging into Node.js now and the whole idea seems brilliant to me. But I'm interested in what the benefits of using Node.js are when developing "traditional" sites with a bit of AJAX and no realtime features. When I say traditional, I mean the sites that one usually builds using MVC frameworks on platforms like PHP, ASP.NET, etc.
I know that the Express framework is popular, but the question is more about what I would gain by switching to Node.js rather than simply "Can I do MVC in Node?".
Node has the advantage of
having a rich open source community with third party modules that solve most problems
having a low level API with a minimal amount of "default" bloat
reducing language context switching
having a decent level of performance
allowing you to manipulate the HTTP server programatically within your application
I guess this url: How to decide when to use Node.js? -is all you need.I am making this as community wiki.

what are the advantages of selenium webdriver over selenium RC

Can anyone help me in understanding the difference between Selenium RC and WebDriver and which one is better and why?
Selenium uses JavaScript to automate web pages. This lets it interact very tightly with web content, and was one of the first automation tools to support Ajax and other heavily dynamic pages. However, this also means Selenium runs inside the JavaScript sandbox. This means you need to run the Selenium-RC server to get around the same-origin policy, which can sometimes cause issues with browser setup.
WebDriver on the other hand uses native automation from each language. While this means it takes longer to support new browsers/languages, it does offer a much closer ‘feel’ to the browser. If you’re happy with WebDriver, stick with it, it’s the future. There are limitations and bugs right now, but if they’re not stopping you, go for it.
Selenium Benefits over WebDriver
Supports many browsers and many languages, WebDriver needs native implementations for each new languagte/browser combo.
Very mature and complete API
Currently (Sept 2010) supports JavaScript alerts and confirms better
Benefits of WebDriver Compared to Selenium
Native automation faster and a little less prone to error and browser configuration
Does not Requires Selenium-RC Server to be running
Access to headlessHTMLUnit can allow really fast tests
Great API
It's explained here.
Selenium-RC uses JavaScript to automate web pages. Therefore it is constrained by what you can do with JavaScript, specifically, it is constrained to the JavaScript sandbox. It also requires the Selenium-RC server. It supports many browsers and many languages.
WebDriver uses native automation and does not have the sandbox constraints of Selenium-RC. It's a little faster and does not require a server.

Web technologies in GUI apps

What's your experience in using web technologies (HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript) to implement part of the functionality of a GUI application? Pros and cons, please.
No servers, relational databases, AJAX, or cookies for session management, nor an existing webapp either, but rather a GUI app that uses web widgets (like Qt WebKit) to render and handle substantial parts of the UI, while taking advantage of a GUI framework to achieve an even richer interaction and better desktop integration.
I've already validated that the approach is possible using PyQt. Content can be rendered from the file system or from strings, and URL requests (images or clicks) can be captured and served by the form's event handlers. CSS and JavaScript are supported, perhaps with some limitations.
# ...
self.webView.page().setLinkDelegationPolicy(
QtWebKit.QWebPage.DelegateExternalLinks
)
#...
class TotiMainWindow(QtGui.QMainWindow):
def linkClicked(self, url):
pass # events arrive here
Note: This question is different from this one and this one made before, among other things because there is no requirement to use web technologies on the GUI, but there is the requirement that the application should work without a network connection available, and should integrate well with the default desktop over different platforms, without previous infrastructure requirements (no .NET, Java, browsers, or database servers).
Note: I posted a different version of this question on PMS but found very little experience with this approach there.
Closing Note
I just found most of the information I was looking for in a series of blog posts by André Pareis.
I think the largest advantage to using web markup like HTML/CSS and other web technologies is that desktop apps may very well have their days numbered.
As we speak, Google engineers are working on the Chromium OS, which essentially consists of a single GUI application... the browser...
Now, while nothing may never actually come of it, there is clearly a rising trend in the number of applications accessible through a web browser, accessible anywhere. It seems to me that this is the future of application development.
By using these technologies, this becomes one less headache you have to deal with when or if you determine that your app should be available as a web application.
Update: A few years ago, we developed an Agent Desktop for our call center that is essentially a local application that opens sockets to integrate with the phone system. The user interface the agents use is built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and the experience is stunning. When we released our latest update in 2010 with a professional CSS redesign, our agents were all very impressed with not only how easy it was to interact but also how easy it was to use.
In the future we will port this 100% to the browser, but for now it needs to be a local application because of the COM integration with the phone system.
We did exactly this for a project back when Windows XP was new.
This gave my team several benefits:
A good-looking UI with relatively little effort
Easily change the style of the UI in a consistent manner using CSS
Relatively simple integration with C++ (invoking functions from the ui and vice versa)
The drawbacks we saw were:
Some not-so-good firewalls considered accessing internal resources (ie other html pages in the ui) to be a web request
Adding and accessing the needed resources could in some cases be a bit cumbersome
It was possible set properties in Internet Explorer that would prevent JS from running in the application
Note that some of Windows XP:s programs are using this approach.
This probably works best with small, more Wizard-like parts of the ui (which our ui consisted almost entirely of).
I have since then not really been involved in ui projects, so I cannot really tell you whether this approach is still valid... I know that MFC-based applications will let you use HTML-based dialogs though.
In a similar situation in 2005 I created a stand-alone webapp using XForms, CSS, JavaScript, XML and XML Schema for offline data retrieval and verification. With a good XForms -> HTML + JS transformer (Chiba) it did the job with no bug fixes after the initial release. It was used for 6-12 months (IIRC) by about a dozen engineers for a project gathering test data in the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider. The biggest surprise of that project was just how much you get for free when going for a web platform, even for offline use. Highly recommended.
The major problem is that it reduces your development speed, or the quality of your user interface. A lot. Unless you're using Seaside, it is much faster to develop a desktop app.
There is quite some number of applications built on top of Mozilla platform. It isn't 100% web technology, as instead of HTML you use XML based XUL, but the rest is indeed web stack (JavaScript, CSS). The most successful of these it the OpenKomodo and it's commercial big brother Komodo IDE.
On the other hand, as far as Qt goes, the newest version 4.7 you can build GUI using QML language. Don't let the name mislead you, it's not markup, it acctually JavaScript with app-specific extensions.

Any suggestions for effectively testing AJAX enabled web pages using MSVS Tester Edition Tools?

It seems like MS really left a massive gaping hole in their automated testing tools in Visual Studio for web pages with AJAX components and I have been hard pressed to find any commentary or third party add-ons that remedy the problem. Anyone have any advice on automating web tests in MSVS for AJAX pages?
I eventually gave up trying, and just stuck with WATIR
I don't know if this will help, but you can try this:
https://github.com/pivotal/jsunit
EDIT:Sorry I reread your Q and realized you meant specific to VS. I don't know if you are familiar with Script#, but I had read some talk a little while back that someone was building a testing framework to use with that, and Script# can be used with MSAjax. Might be worth some investigation.
http://scriptsharp.com/

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