I am in need of some test automation tools for a GTK/GNOME GUI, and after scanning the Python Testing Tools Taxonomy and doing a bit of investigating, it looks like there are three possibilites.
dogtail and the Linux Desktop Testing Project both use accessibility libraries to drive GNOME applications. I found two comparisons here and here. It seems like dogtail is more me-friendly (better Python interface, less XML) and LDTP is more mature and up-to-date.
A third option is Xnee, which is a generic (and non-Python) X-Windows event recorder and playback system. There's a brief mention of it "in the wild" here.
I would be interested in any personal knowledge people have of these projects. None of them seem to be that widely used or mentioned, based solely on Google juice, so anything you can tell me would help. Right now I'm thinking that I will have to just try each of them out to see which one fits my needs best... <sigh>
--titus
Legacy Comments
Posted by Ali Afshar on 2007-10-31 at 19:48.
Hi Titus, good luck searching for what has become for me the Holy
Grail of Gui programming. If you are doing PyGTK, I can recommend
the (prototype) test recorder/player in Kiwi (also listed on the
Taxonomy) <a href="http://www.async.com.br/projects/kiwi/">http://www.
async.com.br/projects/kiwi/</a>. It records your events as a Python
script that looks very much like a doctest. Unfortunately it is
still incomplete, and I am not sure the author (Johan Dahlin) has a
keen interest in developing it further. Here is a little example I
just recorded. The application opened a login dialog, and I am just
entering the login username "admin": ... -*- Mode: doctest -*- ...
run: pharma.py >>> from kiwi.ui.test.runner import runner
>>> runner.start() >>> runner.sleep(6.7)
>>> GtkDialog = runner.waitopen("GtkDialog") >>>
GtkDialog.GtkEntry.set_text("a") >>>
GtkDialog.GtkEntry.set_text("ad") >>> runner.sleep(0.1)
>>> GtkDialog.GtkEntry.set_text("adm") >>>
runner.sleep(0.1) You can play the script back then, including
assertions where required. On a different note, I use this approach
to synchronise PyGTK in order to test it properly: <a
href="http://unpythonic.blogspot.com/2007/03/unit-testing-
pygtk.html">http://unpythonic.blogspot.com/2007/03/unit-testing-
pygtk.html</a> Ali
Posted by Noah Gift on 2007-11-01 at 19:26.
Titus, I just started looking at all three of these as well. If you are testing GTK 1 applications too, as GTK 2 is when user accessibility stuff was added, then you are limited to Xnee. I started to use Xnee and it is quite interesting, but one limitation I ran into was, how do you assert if a condition has not been met? If you start doing more with Xnee, and find some ways to make Xnee a test harness, I would be very interested. Xnee does have quite a bit of raw potential.
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