SPA2009 - first impressions

Maybe I'm biased, of course, but for me the SPA2009 conference felt even better than last year's. I think it had the right mix of technical and non-technical sessions, mostly of very high quality, and a few really interesting BOF (birds of a feather) sessions - which for once, didn't feel as if they were just squeezed in at the last minute.

Functional programming (in particular, Haskell) was a major theme this year, as was testing. My eyes were opened to the possibility of doing test-driven development (TDD) in Haskell - in fact, functional languages are better at this than imperative (stateful) languages. It was also good to meet up with a lot of familiar faces at the joint XtC meeting on the Tuesday night.

My session notes are on my other laptop. I will try to post them on the SPA SG site over the Easter weekend, other duties permitting.

Automating testing of web sites with multiple browsers

After several days of trying, I've just abandoned an attempt to automate web site tests with multiple browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera under various operating systems). My findings are written up here. Briefly, I think that Selenium RC has the right architecture, but currently the linkage between the RC server and the browser only works 100% for Firefox. This isn't enough.

It seems from the documentation that Watir should support the functionality needed. Can anyone confirm that it's possible to test pages such as this one in at least three different browser types with it?

Update (9 April): I discovered that Selenium RC has a start-up parameter "-proxyInjectionMode", which is equivalent to choosing the "*pi..." launchers where available. Unfortunately this only works with "*firefox", so you might just as well use "*pifirefox". It isn't clear to me why it causes tests to fail when they launch a browser with "*mock".

I was also reminded at the SPA2009 conference that it might be worth trying out Cucumber, rSpec, Concordion or other tools, so long as they will drive more than one browser.