Friday, April 6th, 2007
TIBCO announces General Interface Test Automation Kit
Category: JavaScript
, TIBCO, Testing
TIBCO GI has released a new test automation kit:
To further support rapid Ajax application development cycles in the enterprise, TIBCO has released TIBCO General Interface Test Automation Kit, a free, open source kit optimized for functional, unit and regression testing of solutions built with its TIBCO General Interface Ajax toolkit. The testing suite extends the popular Selenium TestRunner open source project with additional libraries and features that streamline the testing cycles for Ajax applications, components, and portlets.
It is a very smart move to take Selenium and add features on top of that, instead of starting from scratch.
3.1 rating from 28 votes
Their toolkit reminds me of the Commodore 64 GEOS desktop.
What?
Here’s an app that uses TIBCO GI…
http://tibco.xignite.com/
Does not look like Commodore 64 GEOS desktop at all.
Here’s the Commodore 64 GEOS desktop…
http://www.commodore.ca/history/company/geodesktop.gif
hey, its more modern than a Bloomberg Terminal
That xignite example, for me at least, seems unresponsive and a little glitchy. (No errors detected by Firebug… so maybe they just need to sort the server-side scripting out a bit or are getting more traffic than they expect and haven’t built caches to relieve the DB server!?)
There were some minor UI glitches too.. more to do with tooltip type objects not keeping position relative to the element they were referring to, etc.)… but are these caused by TIBCO itself or modifications/tweaks/amendments besides the stuff that TIBCO generates?
Never have I seen a more slow and clunky browser-based application than that xignite example. 3 or 4 minutes of 100% cpu to load it and render to a working state. The animations are literally a slideshow. Buttons do not indicate keyboard focus. I could go on.
It may be the best thing since sliced bread but, as it is, it is totally unusable.
I evidently saw the demo at a bad time, just tried it again and it’s working at a reasonable speed now. Just goes to show how server-side issues can effect people’s perspective of your applications, even if the client-side code is really good.
For want to automation Ajax application using IE or FF using one consistent API, look at WebAii at http://www.artoftest.com. It is a .NET based application that provides a rich automation API with ability so do unit testing of javascript using visual studio and .net….