[SOLVED] Headless replacement of selenium and watir for testing Rails and Merb applications

Headless replacement of selenium and watir for testing Rails and Merb applications

Solution

For the moment, there seems to be most momentum around celerity which is a Jruby wrapper around HtmlUnit mentioned by "orip"

Also there is a pretty neat wrapper "culerity" around celerity, which allows you to access HtmlUnit (running Java/JRuby) in your normal machine setup. Culerity is the bridge between Cucumber and Celerity.

This is brilliant for writing tests in Cucumber, which i can highly recommend.

Here is more info:

http://drogomir.com/blog/2009/6/16/cucumber-and-celerity-testing-unobtrusive-javascript

And here is the culerity examples: http://github.com/drogus/culerity-javascript-example/tree/master

Here is the culerity project itself also with good examples (and a nice install guide) http://github.com/langalex/culerity/tree/master

A note on maturity of this setup: I experimented with this a couple of weeks ago. And i got the culerity examples up and running fairly easy.

On the other hand, I had problems with two things:

I wanted it to access my local Rails app via Webrat and ran into problems with that -- (The culerity interface to Webrat is not mature enough as of time writing).
The approach seemed much slower than running similar tests via Selenium (which starts a regular browser). In my example, the selenium test was about 3-4 times faster than a culerity test.

Some of my findings may be a result of trying this out on the extreme bleeding edge. However, i still think that this will be the way, the headless browser tests will go, and apart from the immature webrat/culerity interface, you could probably create some decent test suite based on celerity/HtmlUnit :)

I hope this answers your question.