[twill] Best place to get started?

Michael Badger mcbadger at gmail.com
Wed Oct 27 06:06:52 PDT 2010


I've managed to get most of what I needed from twill by reading the examples
on the project site and running all my tests manually, at first. You can
start an interactive environment by running twill-sh. Then you can use
commands, such as show and showforms to inspect your html.

Zenoss Core has a Synthetic Transactions add-on module (called a zenpack)
that uses twill. I use it to monitor several sites and it works reasonably
well. The big downside right now is that zenpack doesn't appear to work with
Zenoss Core 3.0 (I'm still monitoring with 2.5 in production).

The zenpack in Zenoss works by calling a python script that executes your
twill script. the result of the twill script is fed back to Zenoss so it
knows whether to generate an event or not. If a check fails, you get an
event in Zenoss.

The shortcoming with the Zenoss implementation is that the point of failure
in the twill script is not visible in Zenoss. So, in my opinion, a simpler
test is best.

The biggest obstacle I have with twill is it's lack of javascript support,
which usually manifests itself when I'm trying to select search criteria in
a web form- at least in my sites. I can usually get around that by manually
building and navigating to a url that has the search parameters attached.
The good news, however, is that my automated checks do not show in the
Google Analytics reports.

Regards,
Mike Badger
http://www.badgerfiles.com

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 9:00 PM, Mart Doyle <mdoyle at temple.edu> wrote:

>  As of this morning, I didn’t know what twill was.  We are interested in
> using a monitor called Zenoss to perform some very basic application
> monitoring.  Zenoss has a feature which looks like it lets us run twill
> scripts and report on the availability of applications.  I guess the real
> challenge is learning how to write twill scripts.
>
>
>
> Does anyone have any good advice as to where to start to learn to develop
> twill scripts?  I started out reading An Introduction to Testing Web
> Applications with twill and Selenium by C. Brown<http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books&field-author=C.%20Brown>,
> Gheorghe Gheorghiu<http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_2?_encoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books&field-author=Gheorghe%20Gheorghiu>,
> and Jason Huggins<http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_3?_encoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books&field-author=Jason%20Huggins>.
> I’ve got twill installed and I can do some VERY basic navigation of VERY
> simple web sites.  For any site which is the least bit complicated I spend a
> lot of time fumbling around and am not really making progress.  I’ve been
> trying to find and install the scotch recorder with the hopes that I could
> use that to record navigation through a browser and use that information to
> help me figure out how to navigate using twill but I haven’t had much luck
> finding scotch.  Does it still exist?
>
>
>
> Any suggestions on how to get some traction developing my first few twill
> scripts to do some very basic monitoring of web applications?
>
>
>
> Mart Doyle
>
> _______________________________________________
> twill mailing list
> twill at lists.idyll.org
> http://lists.idyll.org/listinfo/twill
>
>


-- 
Mike Badger
Professional and Technical Writing
http://www.badgerfiles.com
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