Annotated References

Some annotated references related to WebTest.

ANT: A Java based build tool.; The XML syntax in Webtest is implemented as a set of custom ant tasks.
Ant-Contrib: http://ant-contrib.sourceforge.net/ant-contrib/manual/tasks/index.html; The Ant-Contrib project is a collection of tasks (and at one point maybe types and other tools) for Apache Ant.
Bean Scripting Framework (BSF): http://jakarta.apache.org/bsf/; Bean Scripting Framework (BSF) is a set of Java classes which provides scripting language support within Java applications.
Canoo Engineering AG: http://www.canoo.com/; Original developer and founder of the webtest project.; Owner of Canoo WebTest in Basel, Switzerland.
Canoo WebTest: http://webtest.canoo.com/webtest; The Canoo WebTest distribution.; An Open Source tool to facilitate automatic functional testing of html-bound web applications.
DbUnit: http://dbunit.sourceforge.net/; http://dbunit.sourceforge.net/howto.html#canoo; A tool for testing all database related issues.; Beside testing your db queries and setup, it makes an excellent companion to WebTest as it allows to safely populate your test db with the required test data. Using the dbunit ANT task, this population can take place right before your test, such that WebTest and test data go together. (See also SQLUnit)
GitHub: https://www.github.com; A Source code control, Issue Tracking and Project hosting environment.
Groovy: http://groovy.codehaus.org/; Groovy is a powerful high-level scripting language for the Java platform which compiles down to Java bytecode and uses Java syntax and features.
HTML: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/; Hypertext Markup Language.; HTML is the lingua franca for publishing hypertext on the World Wide Web; Consider visiting the site of the world wide web consortium to find more information about html variants, formats, parsers and validators.
HtmlUnit: http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net/; The Open Source java unit testing framework for testing web based applications.; This is the "browser" used to play webtest test suites.
HTML Validator: http://validator.w3.org/; http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/; http://www.htmlvalidator.com/; http://arealvalidator.com/; A program that checks whether an HTML page conforms to the standard.; There are free validators on the web and commercial ones that can be run locally.; Use one! It's worth it!
HTTP: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/; ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2616.txt; Hypertext Transfer Protocol.; The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is used by browsers to request pages and images and submit forms. It is also used by RESTful Web Services to access services.
IBM Public License: http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/license10.html; IBM Public License conditions
JavaScript: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-262.htm; http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/script56/html/js56jsoriJScript.asp; http://www.mozilla.org/js/; The scripting language supported by most browsers.
Jemmy: http://jemmy.netbeans.org/; Jemmy is a library that is used to create automated tests for Java GUI applications.; Is used in the AppletRunner step.
Jetty: http://jetty.mortbay.org/jetty/; Jetty is a 100% Java HTTP Server and Servlet Container.; Is used to preform selftest in a controlled environment during the build of webtest.
Jira: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/; A Bug Tracking, Issue Tracking and Project Management Tool.; Thanks to the atlassian people for providing such an excellent tool and for supporting Canoo WebTest with a free open source license.
JTidy: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jtidy; Small and lean Open Source HTML parser.; Is used in the HttpUnit package.
JUnit: http://www.junit.org/; Home of the unit test community.; Points to articles, downloads and other on-line resources.; Unit test tools for other languages than Java are also available, including Smalltalk, C++, Perl, Python, JavaScript and even VisualBasic.
Maven: http://maven.apache.org/; Maven is a Java project management and project comprehension tool that provides a well defined model for your project.
Maven Canoo WebTest Plugin: http://maven-plugins.sourceforge.net/maven-webtest-plugin/index.html; http://jakarta.apache.org/turbine/maven/; Provided by Siegfried Goeschl.; Maven is a Java project management and project comprehension tool that provides a well defined model for your project. The Canoo WebTest plugin comes into play to model the acceptance tests. Typically Maven, that model is validated, run, and results get visualized.
NekoHTML: http://www.apache.org/~andyc/neko/doc/html/; NekoHTML is a simple HTML scanner/parser and tag balancer that enables application programmers to parse HTML documents and access the information using standard XML interfaces.; NekoHTML is used in the HtmlUnit package.
opencsv: http://opencsv.sourceforge.net; opencsv is a free open-source csv (comma-separated value) parser library written in Java
PDF: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/adobepdf.html; Invented by Adobe, Portable Document Format (PDF) is the published specification used around the world for secure, reliable electronic document distribution and exchange.
PDFBox: http://www.pdfbox.org; PDFBox is a free open-source Java PDF Library developed by Ben Litchfield.
regular expression: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html; Canoo WebTest uses the built in Regular Expression capacities of Java (since 1.4) with the dotall mode enabled (allows "." to match any character including a line terminator, this is what Perl names the single line mode).
SQLUnit: http://sqlunit.sourceforge.net/; http://sqlunit.sourceforge.net/x3931.html; A tool for testing all database related issues.; Besides testing your db stored procedures, queries and setup, it makes an excellent companion to WebTest as it allows you to safely populate your test db with the required test data. Using the sqlunit ANT task, this population can take place right before your test, so that WebTest and the database test data are always in sync. Post test tidy up is also supported. SQLUnit supports reporting using an XML file compatible with WebTest's reporting format, so that you can generate HTML reports combining both sets of information. (See also DbUnit)
The Jakarta Project: http://jakarta.apache.org/; The leading Java open source software site.; Includes the Apache web server, Tomcat, ANT, Log4J, Cactus, ORO, Struts and many more.
Xerces: http://xerces.apache.org/xerces2-j/; Apache Xerces XML Parser
XLS: http://office.microsoft.com/excel; File format used by Microsoft Excel to save spreadsheets.
XML: http://www.w3.org/xml; Extensible Markup Language
XPath: http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath; http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/; XML Path Language.; XPath defines a formal notation to reference parts of XML document structures. Its main use is for XSLT and XPointer.; XPath expressions allow to query a document like you would query a database by SQL. In combination with Canoo WebTest it enables queries on HTML documents.
XPather: http://xpath.alephzarro.com/; Firefox plugin to evaluate and generate XPath expressions while browsing.
XPath Explorer: http://www.purpletech.com/xpe/index.jsp; Alex Chaffee's XPath Exploration tool.; It not only allows exploring XML/HTML using XPath, it also makes creating XPath expressions a real pleasure, as you can select the node under test and the expression will be created for you.; The XPath Explorer is the recommended companion to use with WebTest's 'verifyXPath' and 'storeXPath' steps.
XSLT: http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt; http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/; XSL Transformations; Uses the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) for transformations of XML trees into other tree structures like html, formatting objects (that can be serialized as PDF) or XML again.