[Seaside] Re: Web app Testing frameworks

[Colin Putney]

On Jun 4, 2004, at 1:23 PM, Roger Whitney wrote:

> Some of us in San Diego have been talking about the lack of testing of 
> Smalltalk Web apps. Have you thought about something like HttpUnit 
> where the tests are run on the results of http calls to the server? 
> Such a framework would not be restricted to testing Seaside apps. 
> Since one would be testing the http output the tests should give a bit 
> more coverage of the web app but also make it harder for the tests to 
> access the state of objects.

Hi Roger,

I'm not sure that approach would work all that well with Seaside.

Seaside URLs are aren't references to specific pages or components, but 
rather references to computational resources - continuations that can 
be invoked by an HTTP request. Because of this, it's quite difficult to 
write tests that drive the application via HTTP.

Now, Seaside does have the ability to create "bookmarkable" URLs, which 
do refer to specific entry points in the application. We might be able 
to use this to create entry points that could be used for testing. 
Another approach would be to create a special testing version of the 
application that provided urls to all the components where the test 
client could find them.

I don't really see the value in that approach, however, since if you 
have a special testing version of the application, you aren't really 
testing it "in situ" anymore. And if that's the case, why go to all the 
trouble of testing via http? Even if we're doing black box testing (not 
looking at the internal state of objects) there's a lot to be gained by 
having the tests run in the same image as the code under test.


Colin