London Geek Night - Mocking 28th May 2008

On Thursday May 28th 2008 there will be a Mocking focussed Geek Night at the ThoughtWorks London office, covering various Open Source Java mocking projects:

Mocking can make code more reliable, more comprehensible and allow you to spot problems in design long before your code is deployed. Speakers will include Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce, developers of JMock and Felix Leipold of ThoughtWorks.

Time permitting there will also be a mocking dojo to allow you to get

See:

http://londongeeknights.wetpaint.com
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/498162/

PicoContainer 2.2 released

PicoContainer 2.2 has been released with a slew of new features and a bug fix.

The news page from the project's site details the changes.

For the uninitiated it is an container for components that follow the Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection  principles. When it first started as a project in 2003, it was the only container that did the auto wiring of Constructor Injection. There are plenty of choices in this field these days, but PicoContainer is still used inside Intellij IDEA and JIRA.  

Also using PicoContainer: Waffle is a Rails "convention over configuration" inspired web framework that some suggest is a deal more pleasant to develop with than Struts/WebWork.

Buildix 2.1 Released

I'm happy to announce that Buildix 2.1 is now available from buildix.thoughtworks.com

One of the major highlights of this release is that it now integrates with Mingle 2.0 and uses the wonderful new API they provide to make it a faster and more stable experience!

More info available at here.

Chris

Linux.com article: Open source testing tools target varied tasks

On Linux.com there is an article on open source testing tools. It is a thorough run down of the field. Of note from a ThoughtWorks point of view is our part in the field's history. Mark Aberdour (from OST) is quoted in the article:

"In functional testing there are a number of really great tools (Selenium, Abbot, Jameleon, jWebUnit, Marathon, Sahi, soapui, and Watin/Watir to name a few) with strong feature sets"

Those in bold were either started by ThoughtWorkers or one of the lead developers was a ThoughtWorker. It makes us proud!

Selenium User Meetup videos

Meeting up at Google for the user evening was great fun.  It was short notice, but we managed to fill the 100 slots on the attendee list, and get two pieces where video recorded, while still leaving time for mingling. 

The first video was the lightening talks by the developers and some friends. Its up on YouTube.  Its 92 minutes long.  Dan Fabulich (ex of Bea, now Redfin) if he is not a star already, should be as his segment How not to run a Successful open source project is a very entertaining few minutes. Fast forward to 51 mins to see Fabulich by name, Fabulous by nature.

ThoughtWorks was represented by me (Paul Hammant) and Philippe Hanrigou.  My piece was on release roadmap (19 mins, 20 secs in), Philippe's was on Selenium-Grid (23 mins in). His featured a very impressive movie showing Selenium-Grid running dozens of windows on Philippe's MacBook.  Jennifer Bevan of Google also talked of their farm and use of Selenium for QA of some of the web applications, and the problems/successes of scaling (28 mins, 40 secs in).  The other segments were great too. Thanks to all the friends of ThoughtWorks who did a segment, and have helped make Selenium the success it is.

The second piece was a Q&A session (which we kinda had to cut short, because the lightening talks speakers were not following the suggested 5 minute limit :).  That was just the selenium developers (minus Nelson Sproul of Bea who could not make it).  See the video (18 mins)

We were at Google for two days in all. On Sunday 24th the developers met up and talked/coded through the day. On the Monday it was a regular work day for Google, so we were able to see the campus a bit more busy than the Sunday.  Planning the release of 1.0, and the assimilation of Simon Stewart's WebDriver into a 2.0 code-line was key.  Selenium users will be pleased to know that we talked about the two pending Flash/Flex enablers for Selenium that might get merged in shortly.  We sadly ran out of time, and could not speak about or merge in an Erlang driver for Selenium (coded in a matter of days by Brian O'Rourke before the meetup).

Selenium: User Event at Google on Monday

When ThoughtWorks open sourced Selenium many years ago, we kinda hoped it would be big. A coming of age of any technology/product is when a conference is organized around it.

Well, that day has come. On Monday 25th February (sorry that is not much notice) there will be a Selenium User Open Evening at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. The ten or so coders that develop the various bits of Selenium will be there for a panel session and some lightning talks at 6:30pm. There will be nibbles too.

The other developers and I hope the audience will be pleased with what they see/hear.

Signup here: http://selenium.openqa.org/meetup.jsp

Here is the official blurb:

With representatives from all the major Selenium projects on hand to present ideas, discuss the future of Selenium and answer audience questions, the Selenium Open Evening is an opportunity to get involved in the future of the project. With Selenium developers from as far apart as London, Tokyo and the US and Lightning Talks on related subjects, this is a great way to meet Selenium users and meet some of the other brightest minds in web testing and Agile development!

For those that do not know, Selenium is an open source web application functional testing technology that is cross platform, and targets Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. It is steerable from Java, C#, Ruby, Python, Perl (and more). For Firefox you can record/playback/save tests. Lastly it has a grid capability for massively distributed test runs.

Site links
The core (beginners) version - http://selenium.openqa.org/
Remote Control mode (advanced) - http://selenium-rc.openqa.org/
The Firefox record/playback plug-in - http://selenium-ide.openqa.org/
The Grid (distributed) technology - http://selenium-grid.openqa.org/

White, automate windows applications

Its hosted here
http://www.codeplex.com/white

Key features:

• Automates Win32, WinForm, WPF and SWT applications

• Hides the complexity of window messages and Microsoft UIAutomation library under object based API
  

• Consistent API for all kinds of application

• Use any .NET language

No need to learn any proprietory script. Use your favourite language/IDE/tools for writing scripts.