Happy Birthday Flash-Selenium! Yay!

It is a proud moment for everyone working on Flash-Selenium. It turned "1 year old" this week. With more than 10000+ visits from 87 countries, 1300+ downloads, it sure has grown over time. On this occasion, I like to thank everyone who have contributed to it through their suggestions, bug reporting, ideas and feedback.

Silverlight Testing with Selenium RC - Silver(rrr)nium

Although unrelated to "this" blog in particular, we now have the RC client(s) to test Silverlight applications using Selenium RC. The project is hosted here and currently has the Java and .NET clients in the "Downloads" section.

Kudos to Sai and Geetan who helped us in understanding Silverlight internals and verifying the client(s) against their prototype. Great job guys!

Flash Selenium: zZzZZzz, drool....

When we kicked off Flash Selenium, Firefox 2 and IE7 were the only browser(s) that we intended to support. But, the world moved on and most likely we did not. The scene was something of this sort:

Then-
Microsoft: IE 7 is awesome. We rule your world!
Mozilla: Firefox 2 is kick-ass. We'll take over the world with FF2.
Selenium: Oh yeah, these two are here to stay. I'm cool with both of them.
Flash Selenium: Thank god Selenium's got my back.

Now-
Microsoft: IE 8 is better than ever. Lotta ppl agree to this.
Mozilla: To hell with Firefox 2. We'll give out Firefox 3. A better, improved, cutting-edge browser full of c**p! We'll make hell lotta changes to the way things used to work with FF2 and how it'll work with FF3. You damn right we will, coz WE CAN!
Selenium: I'll patch myself to make things work for now. Man these two guys are driving me nuts!
Flash Selenium: zZzZZzz, drool....

So now you see, we thought that we had the most generic solution that was transparent to the outside world and could be used to test even Einstein's Theory Of Relativity, but boy were we wrong! Firefox 3 made some changes to the way Javascript functions were invoked as compared to Firefox 2 and it's only when the issue was logged that we snapped out of our dream and came crashing down to reality.

FF2 used the document. notation while FF3 will use window.document. notation to refer to a document object. I still don't know why Mozilla ended up making this change but Flash Selenium went in for a toss.

The good news is that Revision 25 has the fix for Java and .NET Client of Flash Selenium and we'll fix the rest in few days.

PS: We appreciate the issues that have been logged by our users. Thanks a lot.

Flash Selenium for Ruby and Phyton

Sachin Sudheendra recently added Flash Selenium extensions for Ruby and Phyton.

You can download it from http://code.google.com/p/flash-selenium/downloads/list

Selenium Testing Flex

At the end of 2007, I was researching functional test tools (preferably open source) for testing Flash or Flex applications.

As I was familiar and very satisfied with Selenium for testing Web Applications I decided to put some effort on trying to use Selenium for driving my Web Flex Application functional tests.

With some work (in fact not too much work—kudos to Selenium) I had a working solution and was successfully using Selenium to test a deployed Web application with a Flash component (SWF).

As a result of this effort, Flash-Selenium has been created and open sourced.

http://code.google.com/p/flash-selenium/

Also a recent article on adobe.com describes Flash-Selenium usage in more details:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/flash_selenium.html