Feature

Open Source Selenium Web Application Testing System

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:15:00 EDT

In my recent blog post – Get more out of functional web testing: How to correlate test reports with server side log information? – I discussed the problem that testing results are usually not linked to the log and diagnostics information captured by the application under test. The blog entry offered a way to link the two sides using HTTP Tagging via an HTTP Proxy. Tagging individual Web Requests allows linking each individual request executed by the testing tool with the transactions that are executed on the server side. Your logging framework or diagnostics solution can then take this tag and link the transaction to the originating web request. Tagging Web Requests with Selenium

Using a Perl Debugger with Server Side Triggers

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 09:30:00 EDT

This article describes a method to use a perl debugger on trigger scripts without advanced interprocess debugging tools. Using a perl debugger with a V4.x server side trigger launched by the server is very difficult and encounters two known obstacles: The server will fire the trigger and the debugger will run in a thread of the detached server process; the debugger will start but will probably not communicate with you. However, if you manually started the server via a shell command then the perl debugger will start, accept input from the keyboard, then you will loose contact with the debugger; it does not have exclusive access to the keyboard because it is running in the context of the detached server process. The next command you type will go to the shell, not the debugger. It gets messy from there.

Engelbart's Usability Dilemma: Efficiency vs Ease-of-Use

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:15:00 EDT

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

Virtualization, SaaS & SOA: Introducing Service Oriented Programming

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:15:00 EST

The advent of SOA and standard-base Web services together with Internet based delivery models has provided the essential base for facilitating new software platform innovations. One of these innovations is a breakthrough software componentization technique that we have coined Service Oriented Programming (SOP). While SOA focuses on communication between systems using 'service operations,' SOP provides a new technique to build agile application modules using in-process, native service operations as the 'units of assembly.'