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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Selenium · Selenium IDE

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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API · Bespin · Flot · Release Notes · Selenium · Selenium 2 · YUI Charts

We get a lot of customer requests about Flash automation, Selenium, and BrowserMob. Because our load testing and website monitoring services uses real browsers, complete with Flash 10, we can do things no one else can do, like run a load test with hundreds of Flash runtime environments driving traffic on your site.

However, while our infrastructure allows for extremely unique Flash testing support, it’s not perfectly streamlined (yet). While we are hard at work on making Flash support for Selenium and BrowserMob significantly better, at this time some work is required by Selenium users before you can get started.

Specifically, the first question that must be answered is: what automation technique do I want to employ? There are two distinct ways to go:

• Native mouse & keyboard integration – good for situations where there is minimal Flash interaction required
• API-level integration – good for situations where there is a lot of Flash interaction required

Native mouse & keyboard integration

Let’s talk briefly about native integration. This is where a mouse movement, mouse click, or keyboard action is simulated at the operating system level. It reproduces the most realistic user simulation. However, it can be very brittle, as it has limited ways to “read” from the screen and validate that functionality worked correctly.

Presently there is no great Selenium-only solution here. There are commercial functional testing products such as eggPlant, but nothing on the load side of things. BrowserMob does have, however, the ability to interact with the operating system using native key events and coordinate-based mouse interaction.

This feature is perfect for those who want to fire off one or two simple interactions, such as clicking on a movie’s “play” button or interacting with a confirmation dialog. If this is all you need for your Flash or Flex integration, please contact our support team and we’ll gladly help you get your script working using this unique API.

API-level integration

For applications that have much more complex Flash/Flex user interfaces or applications that are 100% Flash-based, we don’t recommend native events as they can be brittle and difficult to confirm that the desired functionality worked. Instead, we recommend interacting with your Flash applications using API-level integration.

Important: to do this type of automation you must be able to recompile/modify the underlying Flash object(s). If you cannot do this and require full “black box” style automation, we suggest you consider native automation or you consult with the authors of the original Flash component.

How you proceed from here depends on whether you are using Flash or Flex. The reason is that Flex exposes some automation APIs that you will otherwise have to reproduce if you are using Flash-only.

Flash automation with ExternalInterface

If you are using low-level Flash, your automation options are a little more limited:

• Using ExternalInterface directly – no 3rd parties, but might requires the most programming
• Using FlashSelenium – an open source library to make ExternalInterface callbacks easier to call

We recommend you first start off with ExternalInterface directly, as FlashSelenium is really just a thin wrapper around ExternalInterface. While it’s convenient, we think doing it by yourself once is an important learning experience.

To get started, we recommend reading the ExternalInterface documentation by Adobe. The basic idea is that within your Flash component you execute this code:

ExternalInterface.addCallback("doSomething", doSomething);

This exposes the function doSomething such that it can be executed by JavaScript. Fortunately, because Selenium can execute JavaScript using the getEval, storeEval, assertEval, etc commands, we’re in luck:

var jsExpr = "window.document.getElementById('myFlashObjId').doSomething()";
var something = selenium.getEval(jsExpr);
if (something == 'blah') {
   // throw an error, we weren't expecting 'blah'!
}

Using this technique, you can begin to expose ActionScript functions that can be used to automate the Flash component and validate that the right behavior took place.

Flex automation with Selenium-Flex

If you’re using Flex, automation should be quite a bit easier. Thanks to Selenium-Flex, you don’t have to spend time exposing dozens of functions via ExternalInterface. Instead, just compile your Flex application using the Selenium-Flex library:

1. Copy the sfapi.swc file in to your project (ie: the lib directory)
2. In your IDE/build system, ensure that the library is included (ie: -include-libraries)

That’s it! Now the next time you build your Flex app it’ll automatically have a whole bunch of functions already created. Even better, you don’t have to do all that getEval mumbo-jumbo we did for Flash testing. Instead, thanks to another open source project called FlexUISelenium (which works in concert with Selenium-Flex), the getEval stuff is abstracted away so that your tests look like this:

flex.type("2").at("arg1");
flex.type("3").at("arg2");
flex.click("submit");

If you’re doing functional programming using Java or some other full-blown programming language, you can get started with FlexUISelenium today. If you’re looking to load test or do website monitoring with Selenium, we are in the middle of adding FlexUISelenium support to the BrowserMob API. We are looking for beta participants right now, so contact us if you’re interested.

A note about recording support

Currently, none of the open source solutions referenced here support recording interactions from within Selenium IDE. While not Selenium-compatible (yet), FlexMonkey is a very good open source Flex record and playback functional testing framework. We have plans to integrate Selenium and FlexMonkey in the future, including record support through Selenium IDE.

In the meantime, you will need to write each Selenium command by hand. This means that you’ll need to be aware of the IDs of all the elements you wish to interact with. Once you know those IDs, you can write the code that issues clicks or types on the component.

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Flash · Flex · Selenium