IronWatin: mind the gap

By Michael Foord -
WatiN is a .NET automated web testing tool inspired by the Ruby tool Watir. R. Tyler Ballance has been working on IronPython integration for WatiN, based on the Python unittest testing library (of which I am particularly a fan) and designed to be as 'pythonic' as possible.
Last week @admc, despite being a big proponent of Windmill, needed to use WatiN for a change. WatiN has the distinct capability of being able to work with Internet Explorer's HTTPS support as well as frames, a requirement for the task at hand. As adorable as it was to watch @admc, a child of the dynamic language revolution, struggle with writing in C# with Visual Studio and the daunting "Windows development stack," the prospect of a language shift at Slide towards C# on Windows is almost laughable. Since Slide is a Python shop, IronPython became the obvious choice.

Out of an hour or so of "extreme programming" which mostly entailed Adam watching as I wrote IronPython in his Windows VM, IronWatin was born. IronWatin itself is a very simple test runner that hooks into Python's "unittest" for creating integration tests with WatiN in a familiar environment.

I intended IronWatin to be as easy as possible for "native Python" developers, by abstracting out updates to sys.path to include the Python standard lib (adds the standard locations for Python 2.5/2.6 on Windows) as well as adding WatiN.Core.dll via clr.AddReference() so developers can simply import IronWatin; import WatiN.Core and they're ready to start writing integration tests. When using IronWatin, you create test classes that subclass from IronWatin.BrowserTest which takes care of setting up a browser (WatiN.Core.IE/WatiN.Core.FireFox) instance to a specified URL, this leaves your runTest() method to actually execute the core of your test case.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Extending Abobe Flash Player and AIR with Python and Ruby

By Michael Foord -
An intriguing blog entry about an Adobe experimental project. It is a C/C++ cross- compiler for the flash player and AIR. This means that you can (will be able to?) cross-compile the Python / Ruby/ lots of other language runtimes and then run them in Flash. The blog entry contrasts this approach to the DLR which requires the re-implementation of dynamic languages - hence IronPython and IronRuby. The project is already beyond proof-of concept, they even have Quake III cross-compiled and running in Flash. Extending Adobe Flash Player and AIR with C/C++ Cross-Compiler Quake 3 has already been ported to managed code , but this is even more impressive. Whether the Python interpreter can be cross-compiled to run on top of another runtime (with completely different basic types), without changing the language semantics at all, has yet to be proved - but it is a very interesting project. (It also means that Python/Ruby will possibly be enabled only by additional optional downloads - but don'
Read more

Further Adventures of the Debugger

By Michael Foord -
Harry Pierson (Microsoft IronPython PM) has been experimenting with writing an IronPython debugger ( ipydbg ) on top of the .NET MDbg APIs. When we last left him , he had implemented Just My Code (JMC) support allowing you to step into IronPython code. Since then he has made a lot of progress including a colourful REPL (interactive console) and solving some difficult problems around getting to real values behind boxed IronPython variables (needed for showing local variables). He has blogged extensively on what he has been up to (more recent posts last): Showing Source Code Colorful Console IronPython ConsoleColorMgr (the colorful console code pulled out into a separate IronPython module) A Little Hack...err...Cleanup Getting Local Variables Displaying Values Command Routing Getting Arguments REPL Console A lot of functionality is now present. In the command routing entry Harry outlines the seven commands supported by the debugger so far: Continue, Quit, Show Stack Trace, Show Locals,
Read more

IronPython Tools for Visual Studio CTP3

By Michael Foord -
At PyCon this year Dino Veihland announced IronPython Tools for Visual Studio, an extension to Visual Studio 2010 for working with IronPython. It features Python syntax highlighting, awesome auto-complete (intellisense) and a host of other features for working with IronPython code in Visual Studio. It can be used with the free Visual Studio shell and doesn't require you to own a full copy of Visual Studio. The third CTP (Community Technology Preview) has been made available for download. IronPython Tools for Visual Studio We are happy to announce a minor update to the IronPython Tools for Visual Studio.  IronPython Tools for Visual Studio (IPyTools) is a set of extensions available for Visual Studio 2010 which supports development of IronPython applications.  This release is our 3rd Community Technical Preview (CTP) and builds upon the previous two releases.  The release is a minor update which includes bug fixes and a number of small features.  You can download the latest rel
Read more