Web app testing framework?

gregorovius has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear fellow Monks,

I'm looking for a way to do regression testing on my mod_perl app (on which ten other developers are working simultaneoulsy) so that each developer is able to produce tests for the features they work on, and we can collectively put together a suite of tests to run before checkins. Having this will allow us to move faster and will give us some stress relief when doing checkins an packing tarballs.

I've been thinking about coding one myself, but I think if I do this I'd most probably end up reinventing someone else's better wheel.

The features I'm looking for are as follows:

* Can run from the command line.
* Can generate tests sequences by recording live-user browser input by way of a proxy.
* Allows developers to hand-insert regexes in the generated tests to validate accuracy of responses.

Does anybody know of a tool to do this, or can be adapted to do it, or know of other approaches to automated testing of web-apps out there?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Gregorovius

Comment on Web app testing framework?

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Re: Web app testing framework? by btrott (Parson) on Dec 19, 2000 at 04:16 UTC
I don't know of a test framework that does all of that, but you should take a look at Apache::test, which simplifies writing your httpd.conf, then starting up a test webserver on a high port to run queries against. It can easily hook into the standard "make test" MakeMaker behavior. I think this takes care of features 1 and 2 on your list: it runs from the command line because it hooks into "make test", and you can use it's fetch method to run queries against the test server. You'll have to handle feature 3 yourself, but I bet the Test module could help you with that, generating output to be used by Test::Harness.	[reply]
Re: Web app testing framework? by smalhotra (Scribe) on Jun 12, 2003 at 18:34 UTC
The thread is three years old, but since I came here seeking knowledge, I'm sure others will too. So: try the modules WWW::Mechanize or HTTP::WebTest. You can find them on http://search.cpan.org `$will->code for @food or $$;`	[reply] [d/l]


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