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. <br>
<br>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). <br>
<br>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. <br>
<br>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. <br><br>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. <br>
<br>Regards,<br>Mike Badger<br><a href="http://www.badgerfiles.com">http://www.badgerfiles.com</a><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 9:00 PM, Mart Doyle <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mdoyle@temple.edu">mdoyle@temple.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal">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.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Does anyone have any good advice as to where to start to
learn to develop twill scripts? I started out reading <span style="color: black;">An Introduction to Testing Web Applications with twill and
Selenium by</span> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books&field-author=C.%20Brown" target="_blank"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none;">C. Brown</span></a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_2?_encoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books&field-author=Gheorghe%20Gheorghiu" target="_blank"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none;">Gheorghe Gheorghiu</span></a>,
and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_3?_encoding=UTF8&sort=relevancerank&search-alias=books&field-author=Jason%20Huggins" target="_blank"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none;">Jason Huggins</span></a>. 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?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Any suggestions on how to get some traction developing my
first few twill scripts to do some very basic monitoring of web applications?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p><font color="#888888">
<p class="MsoNormal">Mart Doyle</p>
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<br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Mike Badger<br>Professional and Technical Writing<br><a href="http://www.badgerfiles.com" target="_blank">http://www.badgerfiles.com</a><br><br><br>