Integration Testing For A Web App

October 23, 2024 Post a Comment

I want to do full integration testing for a web application. I want to test many things like AJAX, positioning and presence of certain phrases and HTML elements using several brows

Solution 1:

If you need to do full testing including exploiting browser features like AJAX then I would recomend Selenium. Selenium launches a browser and controls it to run the tests.

It supports all the major platforms and browsers. Selenium itself is implemented in Java but that is not really an issue if it is being used to test a web application through its user interface.

Selenium tests are a sequence of commands in an HTML table, the supported commands are in well documented. There is also an IDE implemented as a Firefox plugin that can be used to record and run tests. However the test scripts created in the IDE can be used to drive tests against any of the supported browsers.

Solution 2:

Selenium is a good way to go. For using it with Perl then use the Test::WWW::Selenium CPAN module.

Here is one example from its pod:

useWWW::Selenium;

my $sel = WWW::Selenium->new( host => "localhost", 
                              port => 4444, 
                              browser => "*iexplore", 
                              browser_url => "http://www.google.com",
                            );

$sel->start;
$sel->open("http://www.google.com");
$sel->type("q", "hello world");
$sel->click("btnG");
$sel->wait_for_page_to_load(5000);
print$sel->get_title;
$sel->stop;

And here are some additional links which maybe helpful:

/I3az/

Solution 3:

In this article, Noah Gift does a good job presenting three main alternatives for web app integration testing: Windmill, Selenium and Twill. Twill doesn't do Javascript, so that leaves Selenium and Windmill as your main possibilities; Gifts shows enough about what using each of them means, so you can choose.

One thing Gift doesn't mention is that Selenium is much more popular -- that's not obvious if you just web search each of the terms windmill and selenium, but that's because each gets (different numbers of;-) false hits. [windmill javascript] gives 325k hits, [selenium javascript] gives 1.2M hits, and this ratio is more representative. Anyway, the point is that, if you find them both equally easy and powerful enough for your needs, so that you have a hard time choosing one, then picking selenium (i.e., going with the crowd) may have advantages (more experts around, e.g. on SO to answer questions;-) wrt picking the somewhat less popular alternative.

Solution 4:

You can also control selenium using Selenium-RC's python binding. For example:

from selenium import selenium
selenium = selenium("localhost", 4444, "*firefox",
            "http://www.google.com/")
selenium.start()
selenium.open("/") # open google.com
selenium.type("q", "selenium rc")
selenium.click("btnG")
selenium.wait_for_page_to_load("30000")
selenium.failUnless(selenium.is_text_present("Results * for selenium rc"))
selenium.stop()

Solution 5:

Selenium is a very good tool to automate browser testing

Since you mentioned Ruby in your tags, I also recommend Webrat which is a nice in-browser testing solution in Ruby.

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