Windmill Testing Framework

The new year is bringing some big changes for me. A few weeks back I accepted a position at Relaxed Inc. and notified Mozilla that I would be leaving at the end of the year.

I started working at Mozilla 2 years ago. I started the day after my employment at the Open Source Applications Foundation ended. At this point I already took for granted some of the best parts of working at Mozilla; working for a public benefit organization, spending 100% of my time working on Open Source, working with very smart people in the open (lists, IRC, etc.).

But Mozilla ... Continue Reading

I’m in London for the next few days and would love to grab a drink with any community members be you Mozilla, CouchDB, Python, Windmill, JavaScript or just plain old coffee, whisky or beer geeks

I’m getting all packed up and leaving Sunday for [EuroPython](http://www.europython.eu/) in Birmingham, UK.

This will be my first time at EuroPython and my first time in Europe!

I’ll be giving two talks, one on [Windmill](http://www.getwindmill.com) and one about [CouchDB](http://couchdb.apache.org/) and Python. The Windmill talk will be more or less the talk that I gave at [Open Source Bridge](http://opensourcebridge.org/) last week, which went very well. This is the first time I’ll be talking about CouchDB, the most exciting new technology on the web. The talk will mostly be about breaking our old data modeling habits that we developed to deal with SQL and ... Continue Reading

I’ll be leaving tomorrow morning for [Open Source Bridge](http://opensourcebridge.org/) in Portland, Oregon.

I’m putting together a new [Windmill talk](http://opensourcebridge.org/sessions/36) that tries to incorporate all the feedback we’ve received over the last year of speaking which I’ll be presenting on Thursday.

Mozilla is also a [sponsoring](http://opensourcebridge.org/sponsors/) the conference and there is going to be some great [Firefox related sprints in the hacker lounge](http://opensourcebridge.org/wiki/Hacker_Lounge). Dietrich is also giving what sounds like an awesome talk on extending Firefox called [Firefox Switchblade](http://opensourcebridge.org/sessions/251).

Hope to see you all there!

PS. I’ll also be at EuroPython and the Community Leadership Summit, more on those later ... Continue Reading

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

We’re going to be doing a unittesting Sprint.

Our goal is to improve the current Windmill unittests in order to reduce regressions and allow us to take on new contributions faster and with greater confidence.

If you’re interested in working *on* windmill feel free to come on to IRC in #windmill on irc.freenode.net any time during the day.

If you want to get up to speed on how to run our current unittests and how they are structured check out http://trac.getwindmill.com/wiki/WindmillUnittests

So much good stuff landed in Windmill over the last few weeks that we decided to push another major release.

The biggest new features are:

* [django management command](http://trac.getwindmill.com/wiki/WindmillAndDjango) for running windmill tests ([Jacob](http://jacobian.org/) said the existing django support wasn’t good enough and I agreed so I wrote this during the PyCon Sprints) * new [nose plugin](http://trac.getwindmill.com/wiki/BookChapter-5-RunningTests#RunningTestsfromNose) * cygwin support contributed by [Simon Law](http://sfllaw.livejournal.com/) (he went and wrote an implemenation of [winreg for cygwin](http://pypi.python.org/pypi/cygwinreg) to get this to work).

There were also some really good bug fixes that landed:

* much better unicode handling and serialization (adam) * fix for POST to foreign domains ... Continue Reading

The video from [PyCon of the Functional Test Tools Panel](http://pycon.blip.tv/file/1947342/) has been making the rounds and one comment in particular that seems to be gaining some traction is a comment [Jason Huggins](http://twitter.com/jhuggins) made about test recorders being “evil”. I didn’t comment about it while I was on the panel because I have mixed experiences with recorders in the tools I work on and some of those experiences have left me feeling the same way.

I agree with Jason that recorders that generate code with the expectation that you will be able to **just run** that code as a test are definitely ... Continue Reading

Just in time for PyCon we’re releasing [Windmill 1.0](http://www.getwindmill.com/archives/412). It’s been almost 3 years of development and I’m both excited and relieved to have something we’re comfortable calling 1.0.

The latest RCs have seen bigger improvements than we thought would make it. A new wave of contributions has given us some great new features in Django support and test serialization and [Adam](http://www.adamchristian.com) has done some great UI work as well.

Big thanks to everyone who contributed to the release and I hope to see many of you at PyCon. Adam is doing a [talk on windmill](http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/schedule/event/9/) which I’ll be helping out with ... Continue Reading