Topic: UI

Can your Selenium do that? Testing flash/flex and silverlight in web apps with iMacros

John McCaffrey, Wednesday, April 8, 2009 @ 4:00 am

Having learned a long time ago the value of automated testing tools like Selenium, jMeter, and soapUI, I'm always on the lookout for new improvements in these tools. While I love Selenium and other frameworks like it, it has the limitation of not being able to test Flash/Flex/Silverlight or Java Applets. But if you need to test flash and silverlight components of your web app, in an automated way, the  iMacros testing tool might be worth checking out.

No Free Ride

While the free version of the iMacros plugins for InternetExplorer and Firefox allow powerful web scripting similar to Selenium, to be able to do the flash/flex and silverlight, you have to get the paid version or the 30-day trial. I downloaded the trial version to see how it compares to Selenium and what kind of damage I could to.

Going through some of the online demos, Continue reading »

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Software Development

From JSP to Ruby on Rails: First thoughts on front-end coding conventions

Brian Dillard, Monday, November 10, 2008 @ 4:00 pm

Now that I've got a few Ruby on Rails projects under my belt, I finally feel qualified to comment on Rails front-end coding conventions. As a UI specialist coming to Rails from the JSP world, I find a lot of room for improvement in the RoR approach to view-layer code. I love working on the non-view aspects of RoR projects, but I find I've got to do tons of cleanup at the ERB layer. Expect to see some open-source components from Pathfinder to help ease this pain. In the meantime, let me articulate my pain points:

Code organization

If I'm filling a front-end role on a Rails project, most of the files I need are in /app/views and /public. I dig that. Likewise, I appreciate the underscore naming conventions for partials. However, I wish /layouts weren't just another subdirectory of /app/views. Layouts are inherently different from standard view templates. A better hierarchy within /app/views would help drive this home. Likewise, I wish partials and full templates each had their own directory within a specific controller's view folder. That would help keep directories manageable on big projects. The /public directory, on the other hand, offers just the right amount of organization.

Continue reading »

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Software Development