[Seaside] Pharo/Seaside UI testing

[Tony Fleig]

I have to say, I am loving the Pharo/Seaside development environment.

Manually testing TFLogin (a basic login and user account management
package for Seaside) using Firefox was taking longer and longer as
added features multiplied the number of cases to be tested. I had unit
tests for the underlying pieces; testing the callbacks on the rendered
pages was where most of my time was being spent.

Yesterday I loaded WebClient and Soup from Squeaksource and together
they made it possible for me to script tests of the TFLogin Web UI
without needing a browser. This even includes verifying confirmation
email callbacks.

I've constructed web apps in other environments (e.g. LAMP, ASP) and
never had this level of automated testing. Its surely not impossible
in other development environments, but somehow it never happened. I've
been thinking about why in the Pharo/Seaside environment this seemed
so natural and I've come up with these reasons:

1. It required no extra infrastructure or products to set up the test
environment. Seaside's server, the WebClient clients, Soup, and the
TFLogin test app are all present in the Pharo image.

2. No shell scripts or Perl or Python code was necessary.

3. The tests cases are integrated into the development environment,
and are not in another tool or language.

Regards,
TF