SWTBot @ Eclipse Party Toulouse

Eclipse Indigo is here !

If you come back from vacation, or dot not follow Eclipse community on a daily basis, you may have missed that once more, the eclipse annual release train has been shipped on time.

To celebrate the event, Toulibre organized last thursday an eclipse party with several talks and a great attendance. This was a great opportunity to give a presentation about a tool I am working on.

 SWTBot is a small open-source tool, dedicated to functional tests. It focuses on helping writing easily UI tests with a nice API.

  Developers are aware of unit tests, TDD is now a common practice and uncle bob converts each day developers to clean coders and craftsmen. But focusing on internal quality is not sufficient.

  Functional tests enables one to ensure that your application works as expected from an end user point of view. When you do not have a tooling to automate these tests, you should run them manually, which is time consuming. If you should release often, it will be costly, and if you have a limited budget, you will release less often. In others terms, due to budget restrictions or due to the necessity to meet deadlines, this is often the manual quality tests which will be dropped.

  SWTBot API wraps each SWT widget. It hides synchronization with the UI thread through a fluent interface, making tests very readable.

SWTBot provides matchers (thanks to hamcrest) to find easily controls and conditions to write robust tests, independent of the execution context.

  One great small unknown feature of SWTBot is that it will take a screenshot each time a test failed, this will give you clues to find what went wrong.

  You will find a lot of information on SWTBot on its wiki page. But if you hesistate to have a look to this technology, fear of losing time in configuration and information seeking, follow this tutorial and in 5 minutes you will have written your first test. 

About SWTBot

I recently read a blog post about SWTBot, which I consider as a unfair rant.

Before going further, I would like to say that I think having several eclipse projects with the same functionalities is totally fine. Diversity and competition enable one to bring innovation and new approaches. I think it, but I have also experienced it inside the modeling platform with Acceleo, Jet and Xpand or Grafiti and GMF. That said I think each project should concentrate on building a successful technology and an enthusiast community associated, and not trying to claim that other projects suck, more over when criticisms seem a bit peremptory.

Below are my answers, point to point :

• I agree that support for other keyboard mappings could be enhanced a lot in SWTBot, but I do not think this issue is a blocker for functional testing your application in a majority of cases. Seriously, how many features depends on umlaut and trema in your text inputs ?

• You may prefer TestNG, but having support for this test framework is not mandatory for having SWTBot to work. However to complain about a feature request, never asked before, making SWTBot not usable, seems to me weird.

• The comment above apply, but I will add that the issue you encounter seems to be rather in the scala eclipse integration plug-in than in SWTBot. Anyway it should be easy to fix.

• I was not able to understand your problem and the what the trick you mention fixes. Please open an issue with steps to reproduce and the behavior you expect.

May be you were trying to suggest cool new features, or priority in fixing issues, in that case do not hesitate to open bugzilla entries or add your comment to existing ones.

SWTBot is a small project, with a dynamic community, which try to improve it step by step. It is certainly not perfect, had issues and room for improvement, but we try to make it work.

Resize matters !

A spam like title because recently I worked was on resize stuffs :

• On GEF Bot there was a painful bug . If the edit part was resizable, a drag behaves like a resize. Now drag behaves correctly and a new resize method is available to resize an edit part :
  
  
  
  
• Do you find useful the ability to drag the selector figure in the outline of GMF Editors ? you will probably like the ability the resize this figure (fullscreen video) :
  
  I will try to contribute this feature for 3.7
  

GEF support in SWTbot and GMF

Back from ESE where I gave my presentation about GEF support in SWTBot last week, I am happy to announce that GEF feature is available in SWTBot update site. Thanks Ketan for that.




Quite obviously there are several bugs opened and there is room for improvement but current API is not frozen, so it's time to test and ask for enhancements !

On GMF side I updated yesterday its main wiki page to use tabs. There is a lot of valuable information available on the wiki for GMF, but it was scattered. I hope you find the new page clearer and useful.

Nathalie effect : goals, tests and patches

In the last post I blogged about La baule beach. This week-end it was the famous triathlon race in the atlantic seacoast city. At Obeo we try to participate each year to the tri relay. Tri relay distance is quite similar to a triathlon Sprint distance, but each sport event (swimming, cycling, and running) is performed by a different person. This year Ed participated with us. He took the opportunity to be in Nantes to went for a fresh swim early in the morning. During the race, Freddy, Goulwen, Laurent, Nathalie, Stéphane and others cheer for us. Despite of these many supporters, I did not beat a time, to be honest I was one of the slower cyclist. However the tri relay was not the significant competition, the football match on the sand after it was the real one ! After one hour and half we grab a victory and Nathalie was the key of our success ! In the evening we were very well received by Cédric, with a giant and delectable barbecue. Friday and today I worked on GEF Support for SWTBot. If you follow bug 269609, you should have seen that Initial code contribution was committed, and that I am currently working on SWTBot build to include the GEF feature. Nathalie tested and provided patches on first versions, so many thanks to her on this side too.

EclipseCon 09 - Week-end before and first day

We arrived with Cedric Friday night in Silicon Valley. Flight trip was an opportunity to try SWTBot and look at current GEF Support.

Saturday morning we decided to see the Googleplex. It was not as easy to find as we originally thought, I mean without looking on google maps or taking the address before :P

At least we found one of their office



as well as their own street



and their famous google cars



On the afternoon we went to San Francisco downtown to enjoy the city and do some shopping. Apple store was an occasion to admire their laptops and ask a seller some facts to convince our Boss that our productivity will increase with them :)

On Sunday we went to Berkeley university, where we met sociable squirrels !



First day of EclipseCon was a lot of fun. There seems to be less people than last year but people are still friendly and enthusiasts.

At morning I attended Ketan great SWTBot tutorial, which was successful as room was filled to the brim.

At the end of afternoon Acceleo "Best Open Source Eclipse-Based Developer Tool" award was the pleasantly surprise. Thanks for the community for this great recognition of our work at Obeo !