[TIP] "functional paths"

[C. Titus Brown]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 03:46:11PM -0700, Tennis Smith wrote:
> I was reading the great article "Testing Web Applications with Twill and
> Selenium", and it said the authors were on this list.   Maybe they can
> answer a question about functional paths they referred to.
> 
> Is there any way to generate the possible functional paths for an existing
> website?  It isn't hard to use twill for that *if* the website doesn't use
> javascript.  But what happens if the site does use javascript?  Is there a
> functional path generator which uses javascript?

Hi, Tennis --

if the site uses JavaScript, you're stuck at the moment.

JavaScript problems scale from the minorly annoying (a site that uses
JavaScript for navigation and form filling) to utterly deadly (a site
that loads data dynamically from a backends) for site exploration.
Then you have to understand the interaction between the JS and a Python
backend before you can get a comprehensive idea of the functional paths
you need to test.

It would be nice for this if you *could* run JS directly from a Python
interpreter; on that note you might try Pydermonkey,

	http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pydermonkey

but that's as much as I know about it ;).  If you try it out for
anything I'd be interested in your experiences.

I'm glad you like our book!

thanks,
--titus
-- 
C. Titus Brown, ctb at msu.edu