Selenium

Over the year's I've kind of gone back and forth on SimpleTest, a PHP-based unit test framework.

A few years ago, when PHPUnit was in its infancy, SimpleTest was the best PHP-based unit test framework. In the past few years, however, it seems like PHPUnit has been improved continually, while SimpleTest has languished somewhat.

Currently, I believe PHPUnit is the best choice for true "unit" ("micro") testing, while SimpleTest seems to be better for modest functional (integration) testing.

If you use Selenium for testing web interfaces, you'll probably want to create a custom Firefox profile for use by Selenium. To me, the main reasons for this are to provide more screen real estate (remove toolbars etc.) and to speed up browser loading.

But it's a little tricky to get Selenium to find your saved profile.

Here's a great link for this :

- http://girliemangalo.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/creating-firefox-profile-f...

Here are the highlights, for a Linux/Ubuntu user :

Start Firefox from the command line and create and save your custom profile :

Earlier I blogged about setting up Selenium, PHPUnit et al on an Ubuntu machine.

Although I prefer to do web development on an Ubuntu machine, for 'legacy' reasons I still do some stuff on a Windows machine. For lighter web interface testing, a full CI tool like Hudson is overkill. Here's how to run Pear's Selenium_Testing alone (without PHPUnit) on Windows.

I assume you have PHP and the Pear installer on your Windows machine. Grab the Pear Selenium_Testing package with :

As part of my Hudson CI server, I'm trying to run Selenium-based PHPUnit tests with each build. The build machine is an virtual machine (VirtualBox) running Ubuntu desktop.

Initially, my tests weren't running thru Hudson and the associated build.xml file. This wasn't surprising since I had forgotten to start the Selenium RC server.

I recently started writing some automated Selenium (Se) tests . I wrote a few tests, and Se seems to work well. But after writing a few tests, I found I needed an easy way to run, report, and track test results.

This lead me to Hudson, a Continuous Integration (CI) tool.

Hudson builds a given project and then does a number of useful things :

• Automatically run unit tests and provide coverage reports
• Show style, syntax, and complexity results