suggestions for web test tool?

[ctassoni]

I've been using JWebUnit for awhile, and while I appreciate the ingenuity that went into writing it, I find that creating tests with JWebUnit is a daunting, time consuming task.
Does anyone in the forum have any experience using another web test tool, free or otherwise?
What I'm looking for is a tool that can ...
1) Allow one to create test cases by pointing, clicking, and typing into a browser.
2) Allow slow playback of test cases so that a non-developer can understand what's being tested. Of course the tool should also allow fast playback.
3) Allow for simple testing of expectactions. With JWebUnit I find that I very rarely go any further than checking that the expected title and one or two expected Strings is present, and that's fine. In my project the web tests are mostly tests of navigation-- core testing is left for either JUnit or DBUnit extensions.
4) Allow hooks where java code can be executed. For example, at the beginning of a test case, I almost invariably like to call off to a DBUnit utility to setup the database appropriately.
5) Ignore minor javascript errors that don't actually affect the user's experience.

[ctassoni]

I realize my question has nothing to do with Spring, but this is my favorite forum, and I greatly respect the opinions of the people who post here.

[Costin Leau]

I have used canoo and I was pleased with the results. It contains also a nice tool for recording your clicks which worked in my case.
The problem is that it can't handle javascripts and it can be hard to work on non xhtml pages as it uses XPATH for analyzing the pages and it can return bogus results if the html is not compliant.

[analogueboy]

I've tried jwebunit in the past, but i didn't find it as good as htmlunit for testing. the only problem is that htmlunit is more like httpunit rather than jwebunit. i had to create a layer on top of htmlunit to make it a bit easier and quicker to create new tests.

unfortunately, this doesn't answer you're direct question, but i reckon that it would be possible abstract the configuration into xml like

[tests base="http://www.mysite.com"]
[test]
[start uri="mypage.html"/]
[click-link-with-text value="click me"/]
[/test]
[/tests]

for example, in fact, it prolly wouldn't take too long to replicate the canoo format using the superior htmlunit framework underneath. i'd be interested in doing some work on it if ur interested?

btw, frameworks that proxy requests and build test cases from them are rarely of use, it is too easy to create tests without sufficient knowledge of the application which leads to very fragile tests...

[analogueboy]

sorry, there should be an extra line like;

[assert title="this is the title of mypage.html" /]

:P

[ctassoni]

For now I'd prefer many fragile tests rather than very very few solid web tests I have, so I'm still interested in frameworks that either proxy requests or that manipulate the browser directly. (The advantage of the latter is that you even test whether your view pages are routing to the correct url.)

So far I've looked at QEngine 5 WebTest Download (manipulates the browser) and JMeter (proxies request and therefroe does not use the browser). Both look promising. With Web Test I haven't figured out yet how to how to put in hooks to setup the database for a given test. With JMeter all things seem possible, but the tool is fairly complex to learn.

[rstearns01]

We use JMeter for our web testing. It allows recording and has a nice UI for creating test cases.

[ncr]

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[katentim]

How do others check HTML validation locally? IDE or HttpUnit/JTidy or other? What about validating against the actual DTD (e.g. http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd).

[katentim]

How do others check HTML validation locally? IDE or HttpUnit/JTidy or other? What about validating against the actual DTD (e.g. http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd).

Ended up just writing a Perl script to remove tags (c, fmt, etc...) and convert Struts tags to HTML (another example of why I prefer Spring's approach of avoiding HTML generation in tags). You can then use Ant's validate task to validate directly against the DTD. Now I can validate 500 pages in 10 seconds.