I'm not saying it was not designed for testing.

We had two use cases in mind:  Supporting testing, and self-runinng demos

What I'm saying is our intent was to deliver the most useful minimum necessary to enable test automation.  It was a very careful balance between getting at the most basic level of GUI interaction, and not going beyond that, while giving enough that testers could automate their tests.

Our intent was to enable others to deliver tools built on top of Robot.

If you look at the "robogeek" blogs on both blogs.sun.com and weblogs.java.net you'll find some writings I've made describing the early history of Robot.

- David



Alex Ruiz wrote:

Hi David,

Thank you very much for your feedback :)

I understand that the Robot class was not created specifically for testing only. Unfortunately I have seen developers still trying to use it directly to test Swing GUIs. The point I was trying to make is that if we use it directly, our tests can break easily if we make changes in layout/component size :) Now I realize I should have made the point even more clear by saying that the Robot class was not designed with testing in mind...my sincere apologies for the confusion :(

I'll write a blog entry about this...thank you for pointing this out :)

I'm aware of other excellent testing GUI frameworks besides Abbot. We have been using Abbot for some time. And we also have been using TestNG. We just wanted to use these two frameworks together. So we created a small project for that purpose. Then we started playing and we got this API (that we think is easy to use) and decided to make it to make test-framework-independent and we got into FEST. As I mentioned in the article, we didn't try to reinvent the wheel, just to make things easier :)

I truly appreciate your feedback :)

Cheers,
-Alex.





David Herron <davidh@7gen.com> wrote:

I looked at that when it first came out.  It's a good article.

As the co-author of the Robot class, your description of that class was curious.

As a design consideration we purposely kept Robot small .. because we did not know how people would want to use Robot nor know the "best" way to facilitate testing of the platform.  Another reason to keep Robot small was to minimize the size impact on the platform .. that is, minimize that "bloat" criticism.  If we'd made Robot a full testing solution, can you imagine what the screams of "bloat" would be like?

Secondly, Abbot is hardly the only tool which has sprung up to offer the facilities you describe.  There's many different tools, including Abbot.  Maybe you know about this page:

http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javapedia/TestingGUIApplications

I see that FEST isn't listed there.  Please feel free to add a link to FEST on this page.



Alex Ruiz wrote:

Dear group members,

JavaWorld just published the article "Test-Driven GUI Development with FEST" ( http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-07-2007/jw-07-fest.html  ), written by yours truly :)

I would like to kindly ask you to take a look. Feedback is always appreciated!

Sincerely,
-Alex

---

Need a vacation? Get great deals to amazing places on Yahoo! Travel.