[twill] Test apps that use Ranvier URL mapping

[Martin Blais]

Hi Twill'ers

I figured that since you guys are interested in automated testing for
web applications (and me too) I would send a link to a new project I
completed, that has interesting features for supporting automated
testing of web applications:  the Ranvier URL mapping system.

It supports testing in two ways:

* Before they run, test programs can fetch the list of available
resources on a website, and then fetch those resources by getting the
URL from the unique resource ids stored in a mapper object, rather
than by specifying URLs.  The mapper object is built from the list of
resources.  This allows you to reuse your tests across different web
applications, as it decouples the URLs from the actual resources.  (it
also increases reuse capability of resource handlers between
applications).

* In the server, support is included for tracking the number of times
that a resource is requested, and the number of times that links to a
resource are rendered.  I call this "coverage analysis" in the docs. 
A nicely rendered page of the final coverage is provided via a
resource handler that comes with Ranvier, for example, see here:
http://furius.ca/ranvier/demo/cov/report

In my automated tests, before they run, they automatically reset the
coverage info (via fetching a special test resource on the server) and
after they've run I can check how much I've exercised my app.

* You could use the list of available URLs from your web application
to generate some of the simple tests (e.g. "fetch me all the publicly
available pages once" is a simple test that will uncover basic errors
in the handlers).


Documentatoin about this is here:
http://furius.ca/ranvier/doc/ranvier-features.html

You can find all info here:
http://furius.ca/ranvier/

Download:
http://furius.ca/downloads/ranvier/releases/

Mailing-list:
http://groups.google.com/group/ranvier-users

Have fun.
cheers,




--
Martin Blais
Furius Python Training -- http://furius.ca/training/