Undoubtedly, at present, Selenium – the most popular free tool for automated testing of web applications. He has been intensively developed and acquires new capabilities, but not so smooth: Problems with cross domain testing is not resolved until the end, IDE exists only for Firefox, etc. In many respects, save a large community and good documentation – the vast network, you can find answers to most of their questions.
But do not you want something simpler and more elegant? A tool that really make your life easier, not to replace some other problems. Naturally you want. And this tool is. Meet, Windmill.
Windmill – a framework for automated testing of web applications. He appeared as a "byproduct" service development Chandler Server Web UI (Cosmo) (service is a "digital assistant" to manage tasks, and events – PIM). Service has not received the expected popularity due to the protracted development process (project started in 2001, when the niche was still empty, and the first release was only in 2008 when the competition was even a dime a dozen). But, despite the fact that the development lasted for several years, the new version of the product appeared with an enviable rate. Initially involved in the development of testers trying to use Selenium to automate testing. But since the service interface has been overloaded JS and AJAX, and new versions are appearing too often, nothing good came of it. As a result, it was decided to develop its own tool that allows you to develop auto-tests with minimal time and effort. Thus began a story framework called Windmill.
Toward the end of the project, it became clear that the framework has turned out damn good and can compete with the currently existing tools for automation. Therefore, in September 2008 saw the world the first stable version of the product – Windmill 0.8.2. Now the project has been intensively developed and promises to be very popular among developers and quality assurance software.
A bit more about who and what develops Windmill, you can find the blog of Adam Christian – one of the developers of the framework.
On this over with history and move on to more pressing things – explore opportunities to Windmill.
When I first saw the Windmill, or rather not even see, but only read about its capabilities, I immediately remembered the infamous Eric Cartman with his znametym exclamation: "Shikaaaaarrno!". And when I managed to write and run your first test, then my delight there were no limits. Definitely, this product is made to last. People and for people.
But let us leave emotions aside and try to look more closely at this framework.
Windmill is written in Python and JavaScript. Details about its structure is not so much. Something can be gleaned from a couple of presentations held at the official site. The only thing you can say for sure – is that the general principle of operation is very similar to Selenium RC, ie, Windmill also is a proxy server that communicates with the application under test by JS functions.
And now in more detail about the possibilities of Windmill.
At the moment, officially supports Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Of course, cross-platform can boast a number of tools to automate, but given that I’ve ever seen Django running on Windows Mobile, the use of Python gives us great hope.
At the moment it’s IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. In all of these browsers, you can use a full IDE. You no longer need the Eclipse or Visual Studio, since tests for any browser you can write directly into the Windmill IDE.
It is worth noting that the situation with Opera is not very clear. Looking through the documentation, you will notice that something where the browser is listed as supported, and some where not. But still, run the Windmill by the Opera I was able to.
Instruction set is almost completely corresponds to Selenium.
The widget allows you to run the IDE and tests, and also doubles as a command line from which you can manage Windmill server.
Work with the Windmill is very simple.