Unittesting for web applications

[Sandip Bhattacharya]

Can someone suggest me some good resources for learning how to use
unittests for web applications? Do we always have to cook up our own
webpage scrapers to test the code?

- Sandip

 

[John Roth]

I believe there are xUnit clones named
Httpunit and Htmlunit, as well as a number
of variants. See the huge list of xUnit
clones on:

http://www.xprogramming.com/

in the downloads section. I don't think
any of them are Python based, though.

You might also want to look at some of
the Htmlunit integration into FIT and
Fitnesse.

You can frequently get discussions on
the Yahoo TDD list.

John Roth

 

[Grig Gheorghiu]

There's another current thread on c.l.py talking about testing Web
applications. Somenone suggested Jython in conjunction with HttpUnit, a
combination that worked for me too -- but the name HttpUnit is
misleading, since it does functional/black box testing and not unit
testing. It beats scraping Web pages though, so it may be sufficient
for what you need. You can see a mini-tutorial I wrote at
http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2005/02/web-app-testing-with-jython-and.html

I don't know any Python-specific frameworks for Web app unit testing.
In the Java world, there's Cactus at http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus/.
To quote from that page, "Cactus is a simple test framework for unit
testing server-side java code (Servlets, EJBs, Tag Libs, Filters,
....)." So this is pretty much Java-centric and may not help you much.

 

[richard]

Can someone suggest me some good resources for learning how to use
unittests for web applications? Do we always have to cook up our own
webpage scrapers to test the code?

http://www.mechanicalcat.net/tech/webunit/


Richard