It's very cool for me to see the options Java developers have to model unit tests of Ajax applications. I was first introduced to this topic in JMeter. I quickly found that my tests had to adhere to JMeter's user interface. Recordings were pretty-much top-down in nature and did not branch depending on the application results. That worked well for Web 1.0 applications but falls short in the asynchronous world of Ajax components in a Web page.
Later I found
Selenium offered me an object library that I could use in my Java applications.
browser.open("/products/search");
browser.type("frank");
browser.click("searchbox", 0);
Windmill came along as a rewrite of Selenium that adds a call-back mechanism to the base Selenium architecture. (There are other differences.)
And now I see JadeLiquid with call-back hooks in their bundled browser itself. LiquidTest looks polished and fairly inexpensive ($1000 dev/$1000 per testnode,) it has a Selenium-like API (aka, browser.click("q") and it runs in Eclipse. I can see TestMaker offering a LiquidTest script runner just like we do for Selenium.
While the blog about JadeLiquid points out the cool call-back features, I could do this in Selenium and Windmill too. I'd like to see how JadeLiquid, Selenium and Windmill will handle the next generation Ajax frameworks, including
Appcelerator.
-Frank Cohen
http://www.pushtotest.com
