[[!meta  title="Website unittesting with Selenium"]]
[[!meta  date="2009-10-21 14:00:56"]]
I just discovered [Selenium](http://seleniumhq.org/), which allows you
to drive browers programmatically.  This allows you to test the
effects of javascript on the browser's internal page representation.
Not very useful for the department website, since we don't use much
javascript, but I like its python interface, so I'm replacing my
traditional spider with a Selenium implementation.

Some bugs I've run into so far:

 * [start() doesn't take any
   args](http://jira.openqa.org/browse/SRC-758).  Simple fix in
   selenium.py.
 * [captureNetworkTraffic("xml") returns requestHeaders as
   responseHeaders](http://jira.openqa.org/browse/SRC-721).  Fixed in
   source, but you'll need to compile your selenium-server.jar on your
   own.  There's a nice, detailed explaination of building Selenium
   with [Maven](http://maven.apache.org/)
   [here](http://wiki.openqa.org/display/SRC/Developer%27s+Guide), but
   for the impatient, a simple `mvn install` in the svn root directory
   should do it.
 * [captureNetworkTraffic("xml") captures invalid XML in URL's
   (ampersand problem)](http://jira.openqa.org/browse/SRC-759).
   Another simple patch, but this one's just posted by me, so you'll
   have to apply it by hand and recompile.
You get the feeling that people don't use the captureNetworkTraffic
side of Selenium very often ;).  Ah well, only 3 open bugs in that
area left to bump into ;).

To keep the test suite easy to maintain, I build it on the fly using
[nose
generators](http://somethingaboutorange.com/mrl/projects/nose/0.11.1/writing_tests.html#test-generators),
which are awesome :).

More details to come...

[[!tag tags/linux]]
[[!tag tags/programming]]
[[!tag tags/fun]]