I had the chance to go to the SV Selenium users meetup (#sfse) at Mozilla headquarters in Mt View,CA.The event had a fairly good attendance and there were two presentations by couple of guys from Mozilla (Stephen and Raymond) and Wade from LinkedIn.
The first presentation concentrated on how Mozilla has integrated their Selenium test suite into Hudson.It was interesting to see the journey from Selenium IDE to where they are today.In my experience it was a normal usecase while adapting to Selenium.The presentation was standard boiler plate but I would have liked to see some internal details.According to them the whole setup consist of Selenium Grid,multiple VM’s to run different browser and Hudson.However I couldn’t understand how the whole suite runs internally.They use python as the language for Selenium RC and had some interesting things about sharing common functionality etc.In all,it’s not unlike what I already knew but it was good to see validation of some of the approaches that I am taking in designing the Selenium framework
The second presentation was by Wade from LinkedIn and focused more on how the framework follows a page abstraction pattern to make the final testcases more readable and concise.The choice of language was Ruby and the framework took advantages of certain default functionality provided by Ruby(method_missing()) to allow the page abstraction.This was interesting but since I use Java,I am not sure if the same technique is so straightforward when using Java.The framework was inspired from Watir and an interesting adaptation for Selenium.
There were couple of side items brought up like what’s the best way to automatically generate XPath from the page as well as Http data generation.When I get an opportunity those two would be of something of interest to me to find out more.At the end got a chance to gripe about Selenium support for upload file and popup boxes.@hugs believes Selenium 2 will be much better,however I guess I will wait before trying my hands(Seen couple of feeds on twitter about not liking Selenium 2 and they had to revert back to Selenium 1).Also he’s going to meet with Dojo guys next month at some JS conference to see if they will have better support for Selenium in future.Would be nice.Testing AJAX is a nightmare with any tool not only Selenium.
Thanks to @saucelabs for the pizza before the presentation.Also got Alex from Saucelabs listen to my evaluation of Sauce labs.All in all good stuff,however I would like to see more technical details in the presentation.Link to the slides are here.There was video recording too.I will update with link as soon as it’s up.
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