Dzone Covers Monocle and Async Programming

July 29th, 2010 by Jeff Goldsmith

Mitchell Pronschinske reports on 2010/07/28 – Greg and Steven Hazel from Sauce Labs have recently built what they call, “An async programming framework with a blocking look-alike syntax”. This framework, named Monocle, is focused on being portable between event-driven I/O frameworks. Currently, Monocle supports the Twisted and Tornado frameworks.

For those who haven’t heard of Sauce Labs, they were co-founded by John Huggins, the creator of Selenium. Sauce Labs’ free and commercial tools build on top of the core Selenium testing framework.

The emergence of Monocle could indicate that Sauce Labs is taking a more focused look at event-driven code and its role in concurrent web performance. Event-driven code is efficient and intuitive, but sometimes procedures are are split up and code is expanded in a not-so-good way.

Read more at Dzone

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Posted in News

SD Times Covers Sauce Flash Testing Feature

July 29th, 2010 by Jeff Goldsmith



David Rubinstein reports on July 21, 2010 —  To ease automation of cross-browser Web application testing, startup company Sauce Labs today is introducing Sauce for Flex and Flash. Now, the company said, testing of Flash, HTML and JavaScript applications can be done in one browser page.

Built on top of the open-source Flex Pilot library for automating Adobe Flex and Flash testing, Sauce for Flex and Flash can natively fire events into those types of Web applications for analysis, according to Adam Christian, JavaScript architect at Sauce Labs.

Read more at SD Times

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Posted in News

SFSE Whiteboard Night a Success!

July 26th, 2010 by Ashley Wilson

The San Francisco Selenium Meetup Group gathered last week for a meetup at Digg’s headquarters, and WOW! What a fantastic night it was.

In the hopes of learning how members were specifically using Selenium, and to foster informal conversations around this, we decided to have “Whiteboard Night,” where we invited #SFSE members to volunteer to share their Selenium testing structures, philosophies, best practices, etc. The setup was similar to a poster session, with different “whiteboarders” presenting 5-10 minute sessions simultaneously and then engaging in organic discussions with the “minglers” who circled the room.

With 70+ plus attendees and 10 great whiteboarders from companies such as Mozilla, Pivotal Labs, and PB Works (to name a few), the conversations that resulted were highly thought-provoking. Most whiteboarders shared their existing test structures, while others proposed new ideas to get feedback from the group. Even Sauce Labs made an impromptu whiteboard visit, with Developer Miki Tebeka sketching out our testing system.

The responses afterwards were widely enthusiastic, with one newcomer to the group writing on the meetup page: “Awesome event! Great to talk to folks working ‘in the trenches.’”

With the success of Whiteboard Night, we’d love to have more in the future. We just need a big enough space to make it happen. If you think your company would be interested in hosting Whiteboard Night, please let us know. (To note: Digg’s digs were perfect. Plenty of open room, multiple whiteboards, and a huge fridge to store our beer :-) Thanks, guys!).

If you haven’t joined the #SFSE meetup group, please do so, as it’s the best way to stay in the loop. Next meetup is August 24 at LinkedIn – details coming soon.

Below are some photos from Whiteboard Night. For more, check out our new Sauce Labs Flickr Page. We’ll hope to see YOU at the next one!
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Posted in Meetups

The Over-Exaggerated Death of Flex and Flash

July 20th, 2010 by Jason Huggins

The war between Adobe’s Flash and Apple’s support for HTML5 continues to heat up. The first set of battles between Apple and Adobe have reached a standstill for the moment. Adobe is pushing Flash for Android (which is awesome, on my new Google Nexus One, by the way). Meanwhile, the Apple-backed SproutCore project makes HTML5 a viable platform for developers to adopt today.

In spite of the Apple marketing machine, we’re betting that Flex and Flash still have their parts to play in the future of the web. After all, how can we just forget about the massive installed base? Flash is now on 98 percent of computers. More importantly, Flex and Flash have comprehensive tool sets that developers still need. Flash is the single browser plug-in that provides consistency for a chaotic and scattered web world. There are things that HTML and Javascript can’t do well, like webcam capture, media-streaming, and full-screen video. And let’s not forget — a huge segment of the web is gaming, which wouldn’t be possible (so far) without Flash. As YouTube recently noted: “While HTML5’s video support enables us to bring most of the content and features of YouTube to computers and other devices that don’t support Flash Player, it does not yet meet all of our needs.” Should we just abandon everything that we’ve known for HTML5 because it is new and exciting?

I’ll admit that even I have drunk the Apple Kool-Aid and see HTML5 for its role in the future of the web. Sauce specializes in cross-browser web app testing and HTML5 is easier to integrate with Selenium. However, the web is bigger than HTML and JavaScript. HTML5 is the future, but we live in the now. Though growing, HTML5 does not yet have the adoption that Flex and Flash have.

It’s this installed base that Sauce Labs is committing to with our announcement of the Sauce Flash-Flex Testing System.

The newest Selenium-based solution, the Sauce Flash-Flex Testing System provides testing of Flex applications on the Flash platform. Other tools in the marketplace can only test Flex applications, but the Sauce Flash-Flex Testing System covers the entire Flash platform. While Flex is a great tool for many developers, the two biggest markets on the web — gaming and advertising — are based on Flash, not Flex.

So, while we’re all excited for HTML5, rumors of Flash’s death are greatly exaggerated. Demand for Flash wont die. To a lot of people, Adobe may seem like yesterday’s news. But since not everyone has an iPad or an iPhone, the answer is still Flash and Flex, even if it’s not the new hotness.

To this strong base of Flex and Flash users: try out our Sauce Flash-Flex Testing System and give us your feedback.

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#SFSE Meetup Videos: Hudson with Selenium + Sauce OnDemand

July 20th, 2010 by Ashley Wilson

At our last #SFSE meetup at StumbleUpon, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator of Hudson, gave a fantastic presentation on Hudson and the integrations with Selenium. He also unveiled a new Hudson plugin for Sauce OnDemand, documented here in an earlier blog post.

Hudson is an easy-to-use, open-source Continuous Integration (CI) server that supports distributed builds and multiple extensions, including those for Selenium. The first video below gives background on Hudson, the reasons for its development, and the features included. The second two videos walk you through using the Hudson Sauce OnDemand plugin, which makes the Hudson & Selenium integrations quicker and easier to utilize.

If you’d like to see this presentation in its entirety, check out our Sauce Labs YouTube channel. Thanks again to our friends at StumbleUpon for providing a great space for us to use for the event. To hear these talks in person, join our Selenium meetup group. We generally host meetups once a month around the Bay Area, featuring different Selenium topics and speakers, so join in the conversation!

Hudson Background:

Sauce OnDemand Plugin:

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Posted in Meetups, Videos

Library for Hudson Sauce OnDemand PlugIn

July 19th, 2010 by Ashley Wilson

By Kohsuke Kawaguchi

As promised in my earlier post, today I’ll talk about the library that does the heavy-lifting for the Hudson Sauce OnDemand plugin. This library is called Sauce REST API, and defines a Java API to access Sauce OnDemand REST API. It’s built by Maven, and deployed to java.net Maven2 repository.

The library is capable of basic CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) operations over SSH tunnels. To use this library, you create a SauceTunnelFactory instance, then use the CRUD methods defined on it.

For example, to set up a tunnel and tear it down, do as follows:

SauceTunnelFactory tunnelFactory = new SauceTunnelFactory();

// create a new tunnel for the intranet host foo.corp.infradna.com
// wait until the tunnel is ready
SauceTunnel t = tunnelFactory.create("foo.corp.infradna.com");
t.waitUntilRunning(30000);
assertTrue(t.isRunning());

// reverse port forwarding so that foo.corp.infradna.com:80
// will come to localhost:80
t.connect(80,"localhost",80);

// do something with the tunnel
...

// destroy the tunnel (and all port forwardings that go with it)
t.destroy();

You can also list the current active tunnels, if you’d like to.
This lists all the tunnels that belong to your account, not just the ones
created by the current process:

for (SauceTunnel t : tunnelFactory.list()) {
    System.out.println(t.getCreationTime()+" "+t.isRunning());
}

In these examples, you see I didn’t pass in the user name and API key explicitly. This is because the library reads the credential from a property file at ~/.sauce-ondemand, which should look like this:

username=kohsuke
key=12345678-abcd-cdef-1234-1234567890ab

This encourages all the applications that use this library to share the same credential source, which is more convenient for users. Of course, if your application wants to control the credential in its own way, you can use a different overloaded version of the SauceTunnelFactory constructor to pass it in explicitly.

The Maven-generated documentation and javadoc are also available.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator of Hudson, wrote the majority of Hudson’s core single-handedly. He is a founder of InfraDNA, which provides products, services, and support for Hudson.

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Selenium Rules Web Testing World…And We Couldn’t be Happier

July 16th, 2010 by Dave Hawley

A new survey by ActiveState shows Selenium to be the most highly adopted testing framework among the automated testing community.

According to the author’s analysis, the “results were a mixed bag as the test automation community has a lot of frameworks and testing approaches from which to choose,” but we read things a bit differently.

With 40% of users preferring Selenium, and the next most popular approach being “other,” it’s clear who the winner is. But of course, there are “lies, damn lies, and statistics” to keep in mind, and at Sauce Labs, we admit to having a special bias towards Selenium :-).  It’s hard not to, though, when Jason Huggins, our co-founder, is the original creator, and was recently named one of the 25 “Best CTOs of 2010″ by InfoWorld.

With that being said, it’s great there are many choices for automated testing, and we’re glad that our favorite testing platform is at least winning “by a nose.”

If you’d like to see useful tips and tricks for using Selenium, check out some of our other blog posts under the category “Selenium Knowledge.” Also, make sure to keep your eyes peeled, we have some good stuff planned for next week.

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Bromine + Sauce Labs: One Big Happy Integration

July 13th, 2010 by Ashley Wilson

The good people behind Bromine, an open-source QA tool that allows you to easily run and view your Selenium RC tests, recently created a Sauce Labs integration. This means you can now run your Bromine tests with Sauce Labs’ in-the-cloud service, Sauce OnDemand, with the added bonus of having a jobs queue AND video playback. Exciting news for all!

Check out the demo below, and download Bromine here to start using it with Sauce OnDemand today.

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Posted in Featured Posts, Videos

Kohsuke Kawaguchi Announces New Hudson PlugIn for Sauce OnDemand

July 6th, 2010 by Ashley Wilson

By Kohsuke Kawaguchi

There has always been some overlap between Hudson users and Selenium users. As a result, the support for Selenium in Hudson, such as the Selenium Grid plugin, has generally been good. But while this Selenium Grid support, for example, does make it easier for you to run cross-platform, cross-browser tests, setting up the right OS/browser combinations, especially in the environment that doesn’t use virtualization, can be tedious.

This is where Sauce OnDemand comes into play. Sauce OnDemand solves this problem by offering browsers running in the cloud. But these browsers need to be able to talk to the web server being tested, which is most likely inside a firewall. Although Sauce OnDemand offers a SSH port forwarding option to handle this, setting up and and then tearing them down (or keeping them going all the time) is time consuming, especially when you are running your tests on a CI server that spans across multiple computers.

I wrote the new “Sauce OnDemand” plugin to fix this problem. With this plugin, Hudson will set up and tear down tunnels automatically for you.

Usage

Once you install a plugin from Hudson’s update center, go to the system configuration and specify your Sauce OnDemand credential:

Then, for each job that uses Sauce OnDemand, tell Hudson to set up SSH tunnels before the build. Hudson will tear them down at the end of the build.

Your projects don’t need anything in their build scripts to do this, which saves a lot of time if you have multiple projects/modules that use Sauce OnDemand. This also avoids the complexity of maintaining a persistent connection, which has its own complications. SSH tunnels on Sauce OnDemand starts very quickly, normally about 10 seconds, so the impact of this to the total build time is minimal.

Host name auto-allocation

Once you start using Sauce OnDemand extensively in Hudson, you’ll notice one problem. Normally you hard-code the host name that browsers connect to (which points to the cloud side of the tunnel and then forwards it back into your intranet to your webapp), but if you do that, you won’t be able to run such tests concurrently on Hudson, since the tunnel setting is global to your account.

In other words, imagine hard-coding your test to send HTTP requests to “example.org”, and you have two active branches of that project in development now. If the builds of those branches happen to run at the same time, their tunnel setup collides!

In the Hudson plugin, I added a mechanism to let Hudson auto-generate a unique host name when it sets up a tunnel. To do this, specify “AUTO” where you normally specify the domain name (“example.org” in the above example). Hudson will generate a random host name and make that host name available as the environment variable named SAUCE_ONDEMAND_HOST.

Your test should then look up this value and pass it to Selenium when you connect to it.

Under the hood

The implementation of this is done in two parts. First I wrote a library that performs SSH tunnel setup and tear down, and then I wrote a Hudson plug-in around it. The former is reusable on its own, and would be useful if you want to take the same idea and apply it elsewhere other than Hudson. My next post will talk more about this library, so stay tuned!

Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the creator of Hudson, wrote the majority of Hudson’s core single-handedly. He is a founder of InfraDNA, which provides products, services, and support for Hudson.

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Sauce Labs on FIFA: Replay or Regret!

June 29th, 2010 by Dave Hawley

While FIFA officials agonize whether to offer instant replay as part of their soccer match officiating regimen, Sauce Labs users experience no such stress. Sauce Labs users enjoy as a default, instant replay on all their tests, making judgment calls about what when wrong both easy and repeatable.

So for all those England fans, cheer on the mantra with us “Replay or Regret” and Sauce will keep the noise going on our end (we promise not to use vuvuzela’s).

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Posted in Uncategorized
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