Windmill Testing Framework

Over the last 6+ months, I have been using Hudson in conjunction with Windmill very heavily for continuous integration. For the most part using the build step specific to whatever the slave OS requires has worked sufficiently well until recently when my needs changed.

I use the ‘configuration matrix’ option to build a matrix of browsers to run the tests, this way I can have one job that represents a test run on multiple boxes and multiple browsers on each box. Drilling down allows me to see the results for each of these test runs within the job. (Configuration Matrix is ... Continue Reading

Getting back in the swing of things after conferencing for weeks can be pretty painful, thus the lateness of the post. However I think it’s important to go over some thoughts still lingering in my brain as a result.

First off, I have to say that for those of you who don’t know, PyCon is a community organized event, and amazingly well done. I was impressed by the design of the conference, the way they had four talks going on at once and they tried to keep them in a similar interest track. Every talk I attended was at least “good”, ... Continue Reading

I have been doing a lot of UI work on the Windmill trunk, and over the past few months I have had multiple requests for the ability to apply skins. Of course my reaction up until this point has been… alter the CSS! Which is not exactly the answer people were looking for.

Here is your answer, and it is now easier than ever.

1. Go to: http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/ and create your theme (or pick a pre-defined one) 2. Download and unzip the file. (it doesn’t matter what you select for jQuery components) - On a mac you will find something like ... Continue Reading

A few months ago I did a re-write of the DOM access functionality used by Windmill and various other projects of mine and the result was a wrapper around ElementsLib called lookupNode. I use this all over internally but until today didn’t realize that it could be hugely helpful for test developers and people trying to debug their applications.

The following list are the different options you have for looking up your node:

• link
• xpath
• id
• name
• value
• classname
• tagname
• label

Keep in mind that we iterate all iframes we can access in the window if the node isn’t found in the page document. lookupNode takes an object, like so:

... Continue Reading

Working up to the Windmill 1.0 Beta 1 Release, I finally had the opportunity to put some time into making the IDE (that a lot of you live in when in test writing mode) a little bit nicer to look at.

The IDE has been growing organically since 0.1 and there was a lot of functionality hacked into it that wasn’t in the original game plan, so I did what I could to improve the beauty of the CSS/Layout as well as the whole mess of code behind it.

Launching If you have ... Continue Reading

Following ‘automation’ and ‘continuous integration’ in the micro blogging world I have seen a major influx in people being super interested in functionally automating their web apps. I have seen a slew of things about Grid, and Selenium, and people hacking on Watir so I decided to show you from the ground up how incredibly easy it is to get automated test running setup using Windmill and Hudson. I am not going to walk you through every detail, this is much more high level but I do plan to start a ‘continuous integration’ page on getwindmill.com in the ... Continue Reading

Another round of productive bug fixes and feature additions have happened over the last few weeks. We are now positioning the project to approach a 1.0 release, which means that our goals for the coming releases is focused on shaking out all those blocker bugs before we push the big milestone.

New Features, since 0.8.0

• Command line option for changing service port
• Django Support
• Forwarding Conditionals
• Addition of firebug lite support in IDE and Testing Application
• Fully functional wxWindmill contrib application
• Enhanced ’smart’ recorder
• Auto element scroll into view to more closely simulate users
• Improved IDE user interface
• Improved frame recursive element look ups for IE

In addition to all the … Continue Reading

Project Status

I have spent nearly every day since July 7th working to bring the Windmill Project up to a level where it can be used reliably in a production environment. Our mission starts with “Windmill is a web testing framework intended for complete automation of user interface testing”, of course this refers to the web including everything and anything inside the browser window. This turns out to be a very large task, one that only an Open Source labor of love could possibly attempt to accomplish.

Windmill has slowly evolved as ... Continue Reading