LOGIN | REGISTER NOW | SUBSCRIBE
 
Print

Windmill 1.0 set for release, promises dedicated support


By Alex Handy


 Alex Handy
Email
December 11, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 2)
When two developers became dissatisfied with the lack of support provided by their Web application testing program, they set out to create their own and to supplement it with an always-available place users could go to for technical support. In the coming weeks, their creation, Windmill, will hit version 1.0.

Mikeal Rogers, a Python developer at Mozilla, and Adam Christian, front-end developer for Slide, a photo hosting and sharing Web company, have seen the demand for their talents increase since they both began work on Windmill two years ago. Earlier this year, Rogers accepted a job at Mozilla, working on Windmill customizations for their browser work, while Christian uses it to test at Slide.

Despite their current status as core contributors to Windmill, both Christian and Rogers began as users of Selenium, another open-source testing framework.

Said Rogers, "The Selenium community skill wasn't there. Their IRC room is empty. We used to answer peoples questions in there when we were using it. During that time we never saw anyone from the core team helping people."

That lack of support and the pair's need for constant tweaks and customizations of the Selenium framework sparked the creation of Windmill. Rogers said that there were things he needed to test that Selenium simply couldn't handle.

Christian said that the Windmill team prides itself on being accessible to users. "Talk to anyone who uses the application and runs into issues; we are personally very involved to resolve their issues. Web testing is sort of a weird space. There's so much you can do with the Web and so much you probably shouldn't do, but people do [it anyway] and they want to test it. I think we're probably the most responsive project I've ever seen for getting fixes."

But the differences between Selenium and Windmill are deeper than that. Rogers said that Windmill is easier to deal with when tested code evolves. "When all that code changed, it took longer to debug and maintain tests with Selenium than it would to just rewrite the entire set of tests," said Rogers. "The debugging was just not there in Selenium. When you're using the Selenium proxy, it's not tightly coupled to the JavaScript end. We decided this was not going to work for us.



Related Search Term(s): debugging, open source, testing, Selenium, Windmill

Pages 1 2 


Share this link: http://sdt.bz/33107
 
Most Read  Latest News  Resources
SAP unveils SAP HANA platform innovations for Big Data and spatial processing
Features include smart data access and expanded cloud deployment options
Alteryx raises $12 million to put Big Data analytics in the hands of all business analysts
Quest founder's firm, Toba Capital, selects Alteryx as its first analytics investment
Google I/O kicks off
Developers get new APIs and tools, and the Go language hits version 1.1
Jelastic launches new version of its Java and PHP hosting platform
Jelastic today announced the launch of a new version of its ultra-scalable cloud hosting platform
Digg!  Digg
Reddit  Reddit
Slashdot  Slashdot
Share on facebook  Facebook
Share on Twitter  Twitter


close
NEXT ARTICLE
SD Times Blog: Microsoft Open Tech turns one
Subsidiary advances Microsoft's cooperative stance toward open source Read More...
 
 
 




News on Monday  more>>
Android Developer News  more>>
SharePoint Tech Report  more>>
Big Data TechReport  more>>

   
 
 

 


Download Current Issue
MAY 2013 PDF ISSUE

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Want to subscribe?