Windmill Testing Framework

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

It’s usually a good idea to document cool features you write and tell people about them. I totally forgot about this one, which I wrote during DjangoCon a few months back.

A few years ago I wrote a patch for live server support in Django. The patch fell out of sync with trunk and was picked up a year or so later and substantially improved. But the patch didn’t end up making it in for 1.0 . Luckily the code is simple enough that I was able to use it windmill and add ... Continue Reading

I didn’t think we’d be doing any notable windmill releases until 1.0. Boy was I wrong!

Seriously Faster

On Wednesday Adam messaged me and said that the windmill startup time was too slow. He was right, we’ve know about this for a while but hadn’t put a lot of serious thought in to how we could reduce it. The issue here was was that we have about 50 JavaScript files that need to get loaded for windmill to start.

Enter windmill-compressor, a new url namespace we added that concats all the js windmill needs in to one file and minifies it. We do ... 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

Everyone knows how awesome Firebug is. But for those times you have the unfortunate task of debugging in a browser that isn’t Firefox the Firebug team recently put out a new release of Firebug Lite.

For some time now we’ve always had a shell in Windmill for debugging but it was never as nice as the Firebug shell and maintaining that code was kind of a pain. In the recent 0.8.2 release of Windmill we dropped our old shell code and fully integrated Firebug Lite so that whenever you need to debug a test in any browser you ... Continue Reading

I had the pleasure of attending the very first DjangoCon this last weekend.

I’ve attended a lot of conferences; big conferences, small conferences, very targetted conferences and very broad conferences. I think DjangoCon may have been the best conference I’ve ever been to.

Over the years what I’ve learned to truly value about a conference is; meeting with people in the community, learning and understanding things I care about that would be harder to learn from reading than listening to a speaker, and just generally having a good time. DjangoCon was fantastic on all fronts. Being so targeted (people who use Django) ... Continue Reading

Adam wrote a great post recently on some code he wrote that outputs his test results in an xml format that Hudson can digest. It serves as an example of a fairly underutilized feature in functest for reporting. It’s incredibly simple and powerful, you add a simple class to the highest level __init__.py with your report code and it will be called when all the tests have finished. Ideally you want to checkin your reporting mechanism with the source for all your tests but only run the reporter when it runs in continuous integration. Another functest ... 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 a project with ... Continue Reading

A large part of the utility in a testing framework like Windmill is the ability to interoperate with a continuous integration environment. Much of the work that has gone into Windmill recently has been the result of continuous integration needs. There are many ways to do this with existing software packages out there that include Tinderbox,Buildbot and Cruise Control however we picked Hudson as a result of the super small learning overhead and amazing simplicity required to setup slaves on the network. One of the requirements of course for parsing results is the need for JUnit compatible ... Continue Reading

We decided a while ago that it would be best to move the windmill project off of OSAF’s infrastructure.

The decision was much easier to come to than the actual execution of the move. I had assumed that the difficult things to migrate would be Trac and that the subversion migration would go by fairly smoothly, I was mistaken. The Trac migration turned out to be much easier than expected, and the subversion migration took hours of fighting with the new server (the culprit ended up being a /usr/local/bin/svnserve hiding out that svn+ssh liked to use instead of /usr/bin/svnserve causing version ... Continue Reading