Posts Tagged ‘Cross Browser Testing’

How to Automate Testing of your Flash and Flex Apps

August 11th, 2010 by Ashley Wilson

A few weeks ago, we announced the Sauce Flash/Flex Testing System, a new and innovative way to automatically test your apps built with Flash and Flex.

The first functional testing product to support test automation for hybrid web apps, Sauce Flash/Flex Testing System bundles Flex-Pilot’s object explorer API into Sauce IDE, and uses Sauce OnDemand to run tests across multiple browsers in the cloud.

Flex Pilot co-creator Adam Christian, a developer here at Sauce Labs, recently led an informative webinar demonstrating how to setup and use this complete testing system. Watch the video below to learn how easy it is to start testing your Flash and Flex apps today!

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Posted in Videos, Webinars

A Quick Request to Her Majesty’s Government

August 4th, 2010 by Jason Huggins

Earlier this week, the UK government posted their reply to a petition, stating that they will not upgrade their systems away from Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) anytime soon. The online petition, created in February 2010, encouraged all government departments to upgrade their browsers. More than 6,000 UK citizens signed the petition.

The petition explains its reasoning: “Most creative and software development companies are forced by government department clients to build websites for IE6 when most of the industry has moved on.”

We at Sauce Labs feel for the citizens of the UK, and we’d like to help. Unfortunately, in its reply, the UK government cites the high cost and time involved in testing an upgrade as the reason it will not upgrade IE6. The official government response states: “Upgrading these systems to IE8 can be a very large operation, taking weeks to test and roll out to all users. To test all the web applications currently used by HMG departments can take months at significant potential cost to the taxpayer. It is therefore more cost effective in many cases to continue to use IE6″

Sauce Labs is kindly offering Her Majesty’s Government some help in upgrading, and a free evaluation of Sauce OnDemand, which will save development time and cost the citizens of the UK far less.

With the Selenium cross browser testing tool, any UK government department can test their site in IE6 and IE8 in one shot. Since Selenium is free and open source software, licensing fees won’t be an issue for UK taxpayers. And with cloud computing services like Sauce OnDemand, there’s no need to invest in expensive and labor intensive test lab infrastructure. Instead, Sauce Labs provides a low-cost cross-browser testing service in the cloud.

We challenge the UK government to create an account at saucelabs.com now and try Selenium today. To back this up, we’re offering any UK government department a free trial account to try out the service to test their department websites in IE6 and IE8.

All in favor, petition your parliamentarian directly and Demand Your Sauce!

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Dzone Covers Monocle and Async Programming

July 29th, 2010 by The Sauce Labs Team

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

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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Setting up Cucumber + Webrat + Selenium

June 15th, 2010 by The Sauce Labs Team

There’s quite a bit of information out there on getting these disparate tools to work together, but a great deal of it is out of date. To clear things up a bit, I’ve documented all the gems and modifications necessary to get these pieces of open source software up and running together. As time goes on, I’ll be expanding this blog post with notes about the pitfalls and various platform issues that may be discovered (I’m looking at you, Snow Leopard), but this should get most people up and running right away.

This is all using a clean REE environment via the poorly named but wonderfully written rvm, or Ruby Version Manager.

Gems you’ll need:

gem install actionmailer actionpack activerecord activeresource activesupport builder cgi_multipart_eof_fix cucumber cucumber-rails daemons database_cleaner diff-lcs fastthread gem_plugin gherkin json json_pure mime-types mongrel net-ssh net-ssh-gateway nokogiri rack rack-test rails rake rdoc rest-client rspec rspec-rails Selenium selenium-client sqlite3-ruby term-ansicolor trollop webrat

Some of those are not strictly necessary, but simply nice to have, while others solved some unexpected problems with the bare necessities. I’ll prune this list as feedback comes in from people’s experiences.

Points to watch out for:
Nokogiri: This was easily the worst on my Snow Leopard machine. It relies on the native libxml2, which had problems with 32/64 bit compatibility. No matter what I tried, errors kept coming up. I had to clean everything out with my MacPorts installation and force a universal installation.
Webrat: The Selenium server jar that was included by default caused no end of headaches. I had to manually go in to the directory, remove the default server jar, and download the newest version from the seleniumhq download page.

Once those are set up, you should be able to use Cucumber, Webrat, and Selenium together without too much headache. Then you can refer to our webinar video (which will be posted to the blog later this week) to learn how to use Cucumber to easily run Webrat and Selenium.

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