On Tue, Mar 05, 2002 at 01:42:17PM -0500, Serge Knystautas wrote: > I was just talking with a coworker about how to build some automated tests > for our webapp, and sure enough Latka does a lot of what I was thinking. I > had a few other todo items I might contribute, assuming I can get my client > to pay or can otherwise find the time. I thought I'd bring up the ideas > first to get some feedback on whether this is going in a good or bad > direction: > > 1. meta process for test definition generation/maintenance > I'd like to define a "meta" XML file for a webapp that could declare > something like "all HTML pages and JSPs" in this webapp should be tested. > Then new meta process code would use that meta XML to check that the Latka > test definition meets these requirements... it would the recurse through the > files in a webapp and look for them in the latka test file.
How would you go about determining the URLs of "all HTML pages and JSPs"? Is this really *all* (ie you have inside information; it's your webapp you're testing), or just visible from the usual application workflow? Ie, is the list created by hand or created through a wget-like follow-the-links strategy? > If there were gaps, the meta check could either a) fail with a list of pages > that aren't included or (my preference) b) add them to the test file with > some comments (and stop before running the latka test). By default it could > just require 200 status codes for those newly spotted pages. The tester > could then look at the bottom of the latka test file, and cut and paste the > definitions up to suites or to more understandable places in the file, and > otherwise flesh out the validations. > > 2. JTidy for HTML validation > I would really like to be able to validate that the HTML in a site is well > formed. If you mean well formed in the XML sense (XHTML), you could use the XPath validator, and just validate for something like '/'. > I've tried doing it with a servlet filter, but using Latka would > make much more sense. Ideally we could define the JTidy settings for a site > and whether to test all by default, and let individual requests override > that. Sounds good. > 3. Better ant/junit integration Wasn't there an Ant task for running Latka in the works? Dion? > I'd have to see what's already there, but as I use ant to do my builds > already, I'd like to have 2 custom taskdefs that will a) do the meta > checking that the latka tests are complete and b) run the latka test. If you're really keen on Ant integration, there's another testing framework called Anteater (http://sourceforge.net/projects/aft), which is 100% Ant tasks. It inherits a lot of expressive power from Ant itself. Eg, you can pattern-match or XPath-match, and then store the matched pattern/XML in an Ant property. You can also use Ant's <parallel> to start/stop Tomcat servers. --Jeff > Comments? > > Serge Knystautas > Loki Technologies - Unstoppable Websites > http://www.lokitech.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
