Ajax testing: Using available tools is key
By Colleen Frye
Ted Husted is a business analyst, author, consultant, and speaker. His books include JUnit in Action, Struts in Action, and Professional JSP Site Design. Husted will be speaking at the upcoming Ajax Experience 2009 in Boston in September, and one of his presentations will be on how to simplify and automate testing Ajax applications. He gives us a preview here.
Some developers and tester feel Ajax is too complicated an environment. Do you agree or disagree?
Ted Husted: All programming environments are complicated. Ajax has its own flavor in that it’s also a scripting language and very easy to change. It had been more difficult to program and debug in the past because it lacked the same tools that people had developed for Java, C# and other languages. Today with tools like Firebug and also the excellent debuggers that are now built into tools like Visual Studio and Eclipse, it’s much easier to treat Ajax like a conventional language and apply all the same tried-and-true techniques.
What Is JBoss?
- A popular open source Java application server that supports the J2EE 1.3 specifications
- Runs under any J2SE 1.3 or later Java virtual machine
- Based on an JMX core where other pieces of the system are plugged in
- Supports JNDI, Servlet/JSP (Tomcat or Jetty), EJB, JTS/JTA, JCA, JMS
- Also supports Clustering (JavaGroups), Web Services (Axis), and IIOP integration (JacORB)
- Production release version is 3.2.1. Developer release version is 4.0.0DR2
- Released under the LGPL
Setup JBoss
The JBoss project is hosted on Source Forge.
The Files section contains all JBoss releases since 2.2.
The files page contains sections named JBoss, JBoss-Jetty, JBoss-Tomcat.
For this talk we will use jboss-3.2.1_tomcat-4.1.24.zip.
Installation is easy:
$ cd /opt
$ unzip /download/jboss-3.2.1_tomcat-4.1.24.zip
This creates the JBoss directory structure. The server subdirectory houses the minimal, default, and all configuration sets.
To run a configuration set, say all, simply do:
$ cd /opt/jboss-3.2.1_tomcat-4.1.24/bin
$ ./run.sh -c all
