I just did a quick test and brief evaluation of Cantoo WebTest – a free open source tool for automated testing of web applications. I found it pretty good and intuitive, and I think it has a rather mature feature set. Having made a similar test tool myself five years ago (based on IE proprietary methods) I felt quite at home, and found the xml format delightful. I would have liked some more features to select specific elements, especially support for unnamed elements, preferbly using XPath notation. It produces a nice report describing the test run, this uses xml/xslt so it’s pretty easy to change into your own report style, or just use the xml report directly from within an application. I am still unsure if the xml format allows for much dynamic in the script, such as if/else etc.. But there is supposedly better support for those things via the Groovy scripting interface, I will be doing more tests in near future as I attempt to build test suits while developing, I will also get to test it’s include functionality in depth, in order to facilitate fragment re-use.

• My first example test script

I started as a Web Developer in 1996, and quicky found the wonders of JavaScript, and has since been doing tons of stuff with it. When doing more complex stuff it has always been an issue of how to get the code to communicate between client and server, as well as between frames and what have you.. In the beginning we had to use hidden frames and iframes to send data back and forth, without reloading the main window. But one of the best features for doing that has only been widely used for 3-4 years in cross-browser enviroments (IE 5.0 introduced it). It’s the XMLHttpRequest API which allows the client to send and recieve XML documents thru ordinary HTTP GET & POST methods. The IO is handled asyncronously and uses events calls to inform the client of the status.

This introduction was taken from the pages of my own AJAX API, which I am releasing very soon, stay tuned!!

WarpXML 2.0 – AJAX on Steriods.

/me found an interesting article about HTTP Compression (gzip), this jgwebber guy really writes some cool articles for Web Developers, so even if it’s an old article I find it highly relevant even today

jgwebber “If you’ve dealt with HTTP much, you’ve probably at least heard that it supports gzip compression. And under some circumstances, this even turns out to be true! You might think that supporting something as simple as decoding gzip-encoded content would be simple and straightforward, and you’d be right (especially given that gzip code has been available freely since, well, about forever).

It seems, however, that people working on most major browsers at various points found ways to make this difficult. It would be one thing (albeit a silly thing) if they simply didn’t support gzip encoding, but it’s another matter entirely that a number of browsers request encoded content which they then proceed to barf on. There are lots of articles out there describing, in varying degrees of detail, the mess that is HTTP compression. IBM has a good one.”

Read the full article:
* as simple as possible, but no simpler: The Insanity of HTTP Compression