The talk was given by Chris Bedford, from Build Lackey Labs – “Automating the Monkey Work Out and the Quality In!”. Overall, I thought this was a great talk by Chris. He clearly has a huge amount of experience creating automated tests and integrating them with build tools and he gave a well structured, interesting, well delivered presentation. I have posted a copy of Chris’s slides and I think the video will be posted on the SF JUG site at some point, but I have also posted my notes from the presentation below…

Selenium Overview

Chris started off with an overview of Selenium – a tool for automating tests for web based applications. He then introduced us to the Selenium IDE – a Firefox add-on that allows you to set up tests by recording clicks on a web page, or by manually entering commands. The tests can then be played back as part of your automated test suite.

Creating Selenium Tests

Chris showed us the process by both executing an existing test he had already setup, and by walking us through the creation of a new test, which loaded a page, waited for text to be present, clicked on a link, and confirmed that text was present. The test was a html file, but he showed how to export it as TestNG and JUnit tests (although both exports resulted in kind of ugly java code!)

Possible hiccups with Selenium

One of the things I thought Chris did well was, in addition to pointing out all the many great things about Selenium, he also pointed out some of the slight issues with Selenium that he has encountered during his time using it, such as

• Difficulties getting the initial Open page to work
• Issues with where the test files get saved
• Making sure you have the tests run slow to start with (to avoid timing/loading issues)
• The Selenium IDE may be difficult to get working with IE (Firefox is fine)

Selenium Components

The main Selenium section then finished up with a quick over of the various Selenium Components:

• Selenium IDE
• Selenese Commands
• Selenium RC (Remote Control)

Chris also had a section on the ‘same origin‘ JavaScript policy that Selenium manages to circumvent by using the Selenium RC Server. He managed to explain the issue in simple terms.

Other functional test alternatives

Chris discussed other functional test alternatives by comparing Canoo to Selenium (Canoo is also an automated web app testing framework).

Chris also mentionted Umangite, Chris Richardson’s open source testing framework that makes Selenium tests easier to write. I have used this before, and agree it is worth checking out…

Using Selenium with Build Tools

He then discussed using Maven with Selenium, including using Cargo (e.g. using the cargo maven2 plugin). Cargo is a set of APIs that assists in

• installing web containers, such as Tomcat, JBoss
• booting and shutting them down
• deploying web apps (.wars, .ears)

Chris finished the Selenium & build tools section with a quick run through of using Selenium with Ant.

Continuous Integration

The final section of the presentation was a talk on Continuous Integration (CI). Chris described CI as:

• A dedicated box (see my follow up question below!) that runs regular full builds (including tests) of your software
• Build triggers when any developer checks into SCM
• Team is notified of any issues

And talked about how Selenium can be used with Hudson – a very cool CI tool from Sun. This leads well into next month’s SF JUG talk!

Q&A

Q: Do you have any info on WebDriver merging with Selenium?
A: No, but sounds interesting!

Q: How closely do test writers work with marketing people?
A: Chris suggested checking out the easyb framework, a behavior driven development framework that allows you to write conditions in a very abstract level, using a DSL that marketers can use and understand. He also suggested looking at the fitnesse framework.

Q: I asked Chris via email after the talk what he meant by needing ‘dedicated’ box/server for Continuous Integration.
A: He clarified that by ‘dedicated’, he just meant that the build box should not be a box that you are doing development on, and that there isn’t anything wrong with having a mix of services on one machine. e.g. having a qa box that has the CI server and maybe hosts the bug tracking system as well…

The presentation slides can be found here.

I thought Romain was an excellent presenter and did a top job of talking on his area of expertise: Android UI development. He covered the issues you need to be aware of when developing Android UIs if you want them to be performant, best practices and work-arounds for the gotchas, as well as useful tools that can be used for development. Personally, I would have benefited from more of a broad overview and introduction to Android, but that is more a reflection of my own lack of knowledge on Android! Maybe the newly created Android User Group will provide an ‘Intro To’ type talk at some point…

First, Romain covered the Andriod UI terminology (like Canvas, Drawable, Surfaces and Views) before covering the architecture.

The bulk of his talk covered how to make sure you UI runs fast, including:

• Avoiding runtime scaling of background images
• Avoiding invalidating (i.e. redrawing) the entire screen and instead only invalidate the small part of the screen that has actually changed.
• Minimizing the number of views you use (ideally have <100, which seems pretty reasonable for a tiny phone screen!) and talked about some techniques to help with this including using ViewStubs and recycling views
• Avoid allocating memory (apparently the Garbage Collector is slow and pretty much stops the world when it is running)
• Use SoftReferences (objects that only have soft references to them will be kicked out of memory if the Garbage Collector needs more memory) and WeakReferences (which can help to avoid memory leaks) when possible

He also talked about some neat dev and debug tools including Allocation Tracker (which monitors objects being created, memory being allocated etc) and Hierarchy Viewer (which shows you all the devices/windows/views you have how long things are taking to render).
He also mentioned the Android emulator that can be used for testing your apps.

Some of the questions from the Q&A session included:

Q: Will Android support languages other than Java?
A: Romain mentioned that there is a version of Scala and python that work on Android, but currently all APIs are in Java.

Q: Does Flash work on Android?
A: Development is on-going and the Android team is working with Adobe.
(I found more on the web about this topic here: http://gizmodo.com/5300800/flash-for-android-webos-landing-in-october)

Q: Can JavaFX be used on Android?
A: Code might be hard to run on the phone and may not be performant.

Q: Apparently, Sony Ericsson are also building an Android phone. How do you plan to avoid fragmentation as other companies start shipping Android phones?
A: CTS – Compatibility Test Suite
You cant ship a phone as ‘Android’ if it doesn’t pass the CTS.

Other links:
http://d.andriod.com
source.android.com
android.git.kernel.org
code.google.com/p/apps-for-andriod
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/
http://forum.xda-developers.com/

Reza is the author of EJB3 in Action and an accomplished speaker whom I had the chance to meet at The Server Side Symposium earlier this year, so I was particularly interested in his talk.

Reza gave some background on EJBs and how they have been completely reinvented as part of the latest (EJB3) release, including using 100% annotations (no xml) and making heavy use intelligent defaulting. He also talked about how Spring became popular as an alternative to the heavyweigth approach of the older EJB releases and has thrived through its focus on integration with standards like JPA, JMS, JDBC and JAX-WS.

He then went on to his main point, which was that EJB3 and Spring can now be viewed as complimentary, rather than competing, technologies and he went on to back this up by discussing the integration strategies that can be used, including

• Embedding Spring inside a Java EE app server
• Embedding an EJB3 embeddable container withing Tomcat with Spring
• Enabling Spring @Autowired annotation in EJBs via Interceptors
• Using EJB3 natively inside Spring using Spring Pitchfork

Reza finished by reiterating the benefits of using Spring and EJBs together to increase ease of coding and vendor neutrality.

Overall, I thought it was an insightful presentation from Reza. I had studied EJBs back in the v2 release as part of the my SCEA certification, and have used Spring in several projects, but this was the first time I had a chance to hear how they can be used together.

I have made Reza’s presentation notes available here, as well as his demo source code available here. You can also follow him on his web site and blog at: www.rahmannet.net.