We’re happy to report that Selenium IDE 1.0.4 has been released. You can download it here and you can find the release notes here.

While this release doesn’t have many new user-facing features, it does clean up several bugs. More importantly, however, is that Adam Goucher and Jérémy Hérault did some amazing work to lay the foundation for a plugin framework. This means that soon you’ll see Selenium IDE plugins that further expand the Selenium IDE capability.

Jérémy is working on one such plugin, called Helenium (see proof of concept in action), that will allow you to do text matching against images and PDF files using optical character recognition (OCR). We’re also working on a plugin that will make it easier to upload scripts from the IDE to BrowserMob.

If you’re interested in how to build your own plugin, I recommend reading Adam’s blog, which has a series of recent posts on how the plugin framework works.

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We’re always working hard to improve our BrowserMob monitoring and load testing services. Over the last few weeks, we’ve pushed pushed out a bunch of improvements:

New Monitoring and Load Testing Location

Hot off the heels of Amazon’s announcement of a new US West Coast cloud data center, we are happy to report that you can now schedule load tests and monitoring jobs from this new location. Simply select the “San Jose, CA” location when scheduling tests.

Selenium 2.0 Support

In December, Selenium 2.0 alpha 1 was released. This release dramatically improves the realism and reliability of Selenium scripts. We’re proud to say that you can try out Selenium 2.0 support (but keep in mind it’s still in alpha) by simply changing your selenium script from this:

var selenium = browserMob.openBrowser();

To this:

var selenium = browserMob.openBrowser(true);

We will continue to keep BrowserMob up-to-date with all the latest happenings in the Selenium world, as well as donate our time and code back to the Selenium project. We also upgraded all the BrowserMob browsers to have the latest version of Firefox (3.5.7) and Flash.

Schedule Load Test UI Improvements

We’ve also made scheduling a load test a lot easier. We now give you a realtime estimate of what the test will cost you, changing dynamically based on your test configuration. We also display tooltips explaining things like “location”, “ramp”, and “constant”. Finally, we’re really excited to have rolled out a “Run ASAP” option that will kick off the test as quickly as it can, usually within 10 minutes.

New Script Editor

Our users love that they can write their scripts using JavaScript, so we decided to make working on that JavaScript code even easier. By utilizing the Bespin open source project from Mozilla, you now will see a rich text editor with code syntax highlighting. If for some reason you’re having trouble with it, you can always switch back to the plain text editor.

New Load Test Charts

We’ve always been proud of our realtime load test charts, but some users had recently complained that they were too heavy-weight and were slowing down their browser. Of course, this is a perfect example of why performance in the browser is starting to matter just as much as performance on the server.

Responding to this complaint, we rewrote the charts from scratch, moving from YUI Charts (Flash-based) to Flot (Canvas-based). We hope you like them!

New Scripting API Improvements

If you do advanced scripting, especially with virtual users, you’ll definitely want to take a look out the BrowserMob scripting API. We added a whole bunch of useful functions, including:

• setFollowRedirect(true) now logs all intermediate HTTP requests
• You can now automatically verify response codes
• If a 3xx response code is returned when you expected something else, the Location header is logged
• You can tie in “interceptors” for both HTTP requests and HTTP responses, allowing very advanced scripting techniques

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Yesterday BrowserMob launched monitoring services on two more clouds GoGrid and Rackspace. This allows users to monitor their websites from four different regions now: Washington, Dublin, San Francisco, and Dallas. We are very excited to have added two new clouds since it will giving customers the ability to see how their site loads from different parts of the country and different network paths.

If there is a region that you’d particularly like to see let us know since we plan on rolling out more locations over the next few months.

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We are happy to announce BrowserMob Proxy a new open source tool for simulating network conditions.

Some early functionality:

• It can slow down network traffic, effectively simulating what a low-bandwidth user might experience.
• It can also easily intercept certain HTTP requests (via regular expression), allowing you to mock out unexpected results, such as 500 response codes, long delays is responses, or even unexpected content.

Please visit the main page to sign up for the mailing list, we’d love to get more people involved in the project.You can also go to the  Git project page, where you can check out the source code and report bugs.

We hope you find this tool useful and we would love to get your feedback and improvements.

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In case you missed our launch announcement on TechCrunch last Thursday I’m here to tell you that we are live. The new monitoring product is now available; take a look at our monitoring video overview.  I’ll be writing some more about the new features and what we are hoping to achieve with monitoring in the future. But for now go give it a try. You can run free monitoring jobs to see how it works.

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Tomorrow night, Wednesday 7/29/09, NedSpace is having a demo night to show off their new space. Come for the free drinks, stay to see us present.

So come on down to Hellzapoppin’ on Wednesday at 4. See the second NedSpace location on NW 5th in Old Town and see your peers show off their cool new projects.

It’s sure to be packed. And it’s sure to be chock full of awesome.

For more information, visit NedSpace. To RSVP for the event, see NedSpace Hellzapoppin on Upcoming. (via SiliconFlorist)

Please drop in and say hi to us.

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It’s been crazy few weeks for us at BrowserMob. Right after we presented about cloud load testing at FutureTest (see more on the Amazon Web Services blog) we were invited to be one of the five companies to present at the TechCrunch cloud-computing roundtable.

The event was a lot of fun and we were really happy to share our unique approach to load testing. The audience especially got a kick when our slide deck visualized what happens when 2000 Firefox browsers are used in a test, consuming over 2.5TB of RAM and 2600 CPU cores! The judges seemed to like our approach too – praising our business and service as one of the most interesting ones at the event.

Since then we’ve been extremely busy with all the interest and positive feedback. We’ve had the pleasure to work with new cloud computing providers, including Rackspace, Sun, Microsoft, GoGrid, and a couple yet-to-be-announced vendors. We’ve also been very busy with several new features, including a brand new API that gives our customers unparalleled flexibility and convenience when writing Real Browser User (RBU) or Virtual User (VU) load test scripts.

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This morning I will be presenting at with Jinesh Varia, an Amazon Web Services evangelist, at FutureTest in New York City. The conference is centered around the idea of exploring the future directions to take testing, QA, and software development. Jinesh Varia wrote up a nice summary of the slides we presented.

In our talk, we will demonstrate how cloud computing is primed to drastically change the way both automated and manual testing is done. Using service like Amazon EC2 and Amazon Mechanical Turk, it has never been easier to tap in to the power of the cloud. The key point of our presentation is that these new services allow for massive parallelization.

BrowserMob’s load testing service is an example of massive parallelization used for testing from the client’s perspective. We’re doing something no one has ever done before: spinning up thousands of web browsers and sending them against your website, allowing you to simulate the most realistic load test possible.

This concept just isn’t possible for most companies. Consider this: a 2,000 real browser user (RBU) test from BrowserMob consumes more than 2.5TB of memory and over 2,500 CPU cores. Assuming each CPU core and 1GB of memory costs $500, you’d have to spend $1.25M just for the hardware alone. It’s clearly not scalable to own that hardware, but our cost effective load test pricing shows that it is definitely affordable to rent it.

But as much as we love BrowserMob, the main point of our presentation today is that services like ours is just the tip of the iceberg. For example, Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is a human-powered intelligence engine, could allow you to enroll thousands of testers, paying them for each test case, to temporarily increase your manual QA effort from two QA engineers to hundreds or thousands of additional eyes.

In the case of Amazon EC2, suppose you had a nightly integration test, which runs Selenium scripts against your application. If you were to parallelize both the client side (ex: BrowserMob) and the server side (ex: Rails, J2EE, .NET, etc), you could execute each test case individually and independently from the rest. Assuming you had 1,000 tests, each taking one minute to run, you could reduce your integration test time from over 16 hours to minutes.

Whether it’s using parallel computing or parallel human resources, the cloud now offers the tools necessary to revolutionize testing and, in turn, software engineering in general. Look for new innovations in the coming months and weeks from all parts of the software stack – from vendors such as BrowserMob to open source projects such as Ruby on Rails. Do you have ideas for how the cloud can accelerate or improve the world of software testing and software development? If so, please leave a comment and join the discussion!

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As of today, BrowserMob now supports both concurrent browsers and simulated virtual users. The term virtual user was adopted by early load test providers as a way to describe the technique of simulating the HTTP traffic that a real user would cause when visiting a website. While BrowserMob’s core technology sidesteps the concept of virtual users and actually drives real browsers, we felt it was important to also provide a second option for our customers.

As a service that prides itself on delivering load tests that closely emulate reality, it may at first seem odd for us to embrace the traditional concept of virtual users (VUs) that other load testing tools use. But we think it makes perfect sense when viewed in the larger context of our goal: to offer on-demand, low-cost load testing to everyone, including companies previously unable to afford it.

Reducing Costs Even More

We still think that using real browsers is the best way to generate load, as it gives the most realistic playback of load, responding to JavaScript, AJAX, and Flash in realtime. And we’re proud of the fact that we can offer real browsers at a fraction of the price of our competitors offer virtual users.

In fact, the only way to reduce our pricing further was to drop the overhead a real browser introduces. And that’s just what we did. For as little as 10 cents per VU/hour, you can schedule a test that uses VUs and generates massive amounts of load at an extremely low price. For example, 2,000 VUs can now run for an hour, generating over a 750mbps in data throughput, with a cost of only $200.

Visit our pricing page to learn more about this new offering and see how little it costs compared to the alternatives out there. Alternatively, if you have any questions, such as when to use virtual users and when to use real browsers, don’t hesitate to contact us.

So Which is Better?

This is a complex topic and there is no good answer. In a few days we’ll post a follow-up that discusses when to use real browsers vs. virtual users. In general, it comes down to a trade-off between price and fidelity, but usually at least some use cases can be simulated with virtual users and still achieve your requirements for load. Look out for our follow-up discussion for more on this.

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Today we’re pleased to announce that BrowserMob now supports generating load from either the Washington, DC area (US east coast) or from Dublin, Ireland (western Europe). This means BrowserMob customers can now choose where the browsers that participate in their load tests will run from, resulting in an even more accurate end-user simulation. This new capability is possible thanks to recent expansion by the Amazon EC2 service in to Europe.

Selecting which geographic source the load comes from is as simple as selecting a drop-down box when scheduling your test, as seen in this screenshot:

For US-based companies and websites, we recommend continuing to use the Washington, DC source. For companies and websites based in Europe, generating load from Dublin, Ireland is most likely a better option. And for companies that have presence in both regions, BrowserMob is fully capable of running two simultaneous tests from both locations.

We expect to continue to add additional geographic locations as we are able to. If you have any questions about our physical locations, network access, or other infrastructure technology, you’re always more than welcome to contact us.

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