To ease automation of cross-browser Web application testing, startup company Sauce Labs today is introducing Sauce for Flex and Flash. Now, the company said, testing of Flash, HTML and JavaScript applications can be done in one browser page.
Built on top of the open-source Flex Pilot library for automating Adobe Flex and Flash testing, Sauce for Flex and Flash can natively fire events into those types of Web applications for analysis, according to Adam Christian, JavaScript architect at Sauce Labs.
“There’s an enormous community of people with interesting applications but need a team of people clicking through stuff to see if it works,” he said. Sauce for Flex and Flash “adds an interface to the Flex application, that like a leech connects to the nervous system of the application, recording interactions with the Web page.”
A hook is embedded in the application that opens an API and, Christian said, “users can say, ‘Do this and tell me what happens.’” The hook also enables users to tell the testing component if it is to turn on or not.
“You can have it in every stage of development and test but disengage it at deployment,” he explained. The hook “is incredibly small. We certainly understand that every one [thousand lines of code] is important when deploying an app to Web” in terms of its impact on performance.
In a statement, Adobe group product marketing manager Dave Gruber said, “We’re please to see that Sauce Labs is releasing a solid open-source testing solution available for applications created with Flex and Flash technology. The ease of conducting cross-browser application testing in the cloud is a great advancement, making Flex and Flash developers more efficient.”
The Sauce solution is a commercialized version of the Selenium functional testing framework, and the company was founded by Selenium’s creator, Jason Huggins. Meanwhile, Christian was the co-creator of the Windmill testing framework. All the Sauce code is in GitHub for open-source use, Christian said.
Sauce OnDemand is a cloud service that enables testing to occur on multiple browsers, while Sauce RC (Remote Control) is an IDE for building and editing tests in a number of different programming languages, including Java, PHP, Python and Ruby, Christian said.
Based in San Francisco, the company was funded in January by Contrarian Group, the investment management firm run by former Major League Baseball commissioner and U.S. Olympic Committee chairman Peter Ueberroth.
