Jan Newmarch
University of Canberra

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Testing

• Improve quality
• Reduce bugs
  • Logic errors
  • Environmental errors

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Environmental errors

• Test on every platform
• Java Virtual Machine is one platform?
  • Single specification
  • Multiple vendors
  • Multiple platforms

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Applet vs Application

• Application is standalone
• Applet runs within a browser
• Environment supplied to the browser varies
• Environment supplied by the browser varies

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Applet test policy

• Test in every browser on every platform

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Test harness

• Can do unit, integration, system and acceptance testing
• Applet testing is at the system level
• Typical method would be to simulate user interaction
• Test harness needs to run within the browser, so must be an applet (probably not a plugin)
• Test harness must be an applet container

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Test language

• Scripting languages are common
• Language needs to be interpreted by the test harness, which is an applet
• Language could be Java or tcl (via JACL) or any language with a Java interpreter

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Test script location

• Locate test scripts with browser?
  • distribution problem
  • may not get local access to file system
• Locate test script with applet, to be uploaded to the browser

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Security

• Applets run in a sandbox
• ClassLoader access restricted
• Event queue access restricted

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GUI elements

• GUI toolkits are the AWT and Swing
• Event types are input and semantic
• AWT:
  • Can't fake input events
  • Faking semantic events puts widgets out of sync
• Swing:
  • Can fake input events
  • No need to fake semantic events

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Events versus Actions

• Events may need (x,y) coords which may be fragile
• Some widgets may support higher-level actions (such as doClick() for JButton)
• Problem: Swing JFileChooser has components such as an OK button
  • location of button cannot be determined at runtime
  • no action exists to drive the button
• Swing has insufficient support for either method

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Test harness

• replayJava is under development to test Java applications
  • only designed for Swing elements
  • scripts written in tcl
  • can generate events for Swing objects
  • can call actions on Swing objects
• being adapted to applets

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Problems

• (x,y) coords need to be guessed for some widgets
• incomplete set of actions for some widgets
• limited event queue access
• no standard for applet containers

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Conclusion

• Testing applets should be done on every browser on every platform
• Test scripts should be with the applet
• A scripting language such as tcl can be used by a test harness
• The test harness should be an applet
• AWT components are too hard to test, but Swing components should be ok
• Problems still remain