Category Archives: Automation

JSConf and NodeConf – 2011

Posted on May 10, 2011 by adam

Last week was both JSConf and NodeConf in Portland, OR and it was absolutely epic. I spend all year looking forward to the various Portland conferences, but this year happened to also be my first JSConf.us, the first ever NodeConf and a lot of thick bacon. If you aren’t aware of that term, it has become a great way to gauge the accumulated awesomeness regarding the quality of experience at a conference. I believe this was coined at one of … Continue reading →

Posted in Automation, JavaScript, Jellyfish, Node, Open Source, Web | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

My new gig – Sauce Labs

Posted on March 23, 2010 by

After almost two years of working at Slide Inc, I have started my new job at Sauce Labs. The press release can be found here: “Sauce Labs Adds Windmill Test Framework Co-Creator Adam Christian to Engineering Team“. Slide Inc. I had a fantastic experience and learned a ton working with the really talented team of engineers, artists and product managers over at Slide. It was incredibly educational to work in an environment where so many people use your product everyday. … Continue reading →

Posted in Automation, Career, Continuous Integration, Life, Open Source, Startup, Technology, Uncategorized, Web, Windmill, Work | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Considering in-house web automation?

Posted on March 2, 2010 by

Recently I have had numerous conversations with people at various tiers of companies all over the place who are toying with the idea of building their own test automation and continuous integration infrastructure. Since I have spent a considerable amount of time dealing with such undertakings I decided that it might be worth the time to brain dump some of the issues you may want to consider before you dive in. Choosing Tools Boxes, VM’s or Cloud? A common first … Continue reading →

Posted in Automation, Continuous Integration, Firefox, Hudson, java, JavaScript, Open Source, Python, Review, Technology, Web, Work | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Windmill Plugin for Hudson

Posted on May 11, 2009 by

Over the last 6+ months, I have been using Hudson in conjunction with Windmill very heavily for continuous integration. For the most part using the build step specific to whatever the slave OS requires has worked sufficiently well until recently when my needs changed. I use the ‘configuration matrix’ option to build a matrix of browsers to run the tests, this way I can have one job that represents a test run on multiple boxes and multiple browsers on each … Continue reading →

Posted in Automation, Continuous Integration, java, Open Source, Slide, Technology, Web, Windmill, Windmill-dev | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

PyCon 2009 Recap

Posted on April 13, 2009 by

Getting back in the swing of things after conferencing for weeks can be pretty painful, thus the lateness of the post. However I think it’s important to go over some thoughts still lingering in my brain as a result. First off, I have to say that for those of you who don’t know, PyCon is a community organized event, and amazingly well done. I was impressed by the design of the conference, the way they had four talks going on … Continue reading →

Posted in Automation, Career, Continuous Integration, JavaScript, Open Source, Python, Slide, Technology, Web, Windmill, Windmill-dev | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Skinning Windmill with JQuery UI Themes

Posted on March 24, 2009 by

I have been doing a lot of UI work on the Windmill trunk, and over the past few months I have had multiple requests for the ability to apply skins. Of course my reaction up until this point has been… alter the CSS! Which is not exactly the answer people were looking for. Here is your answer, and it is now easier than ever. 1. Go to: http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/ and create your theme (or pick a pre-defined one) 2. Download and … Continue reading →

Posted in Automation, JavaScript, Windmill, Windmill-dev | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

MozMill 1.1 UI Overview

Posted on March 9, 2009 by

During the Open Design session at Mozilla with Aza we were informed that we could load a HTML file with a Chrome URL, allowing me to rebuild the MozMill UI a bit more like a web page instead of using the XUL constructs that I had been struggling with. Granted it feels a lot more like a web page than it does a desktop application, but the speed that I can build new UI features by using libraries like JQuery … Continue reading →

Posted in Automation, Firefox, JavaScript, Mozilla, Open Source | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Meet lookupNode

Posted on January 20, 2009 by

A few months ago I did a re-write of the DOM access functionality used by Windmill and various other projects of mine and the result was a wrapper around ElementsLib called lookupNode. I use this all over internally but until today didn’t realize that it could be hugely helpful for test developers and people trying to debug their applications. The following list are the different options you have for looking up your node: link xpath id name value classname tagname … Continue reading →

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This thing I’m calling Windmill-Lite

Posted on January 14, 2009 by

In preparation for the Windmill 2 client side re-architecting, and an article I am writing about simulating user sessions with JavaScript, I decided it was time to go through the Windmill JavaScript source and pull out the pieces necessary to drive a user session in JavaScript. It turns out that it’s easily broken into a few pieces: Events: Cross browser compatible event firing functionality ElementsLib: DOM element lookup functionality via many methods called ‘locators’ Controller: The logic for firing the … Continue reading →

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Diving into GIT

Posted on November 25, 2008 by

Over the last year, I have known that the day would come when I could no longer avoid moving from SVN (my comfort zone) to this new beast called GIT that everyone is so excited about. My first hour, which was installing it on my Mac and pulling down a repo to play with was very pleasant. My ssh keys and ~/.ssh/config was already setup the way I wanted and everything just worked. The pain began when I started in … Continue reading →

Posted in Automation, Continuous Integration, Hudson, Slide, Technology, Windmill, Work | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment