Re: Automated testing of cgi / perl

I came across Selenium today, which looks rather useful, and has the
advantage of being able to run tests under various browsers. Also worthy
of note is jsunit.



With so many pages, there must be an automated test plan. Otherwise,
how did the site get so large without detecting and fixing bugs? Or was
that what your customers are for?

You can write perl code that uses HTML CPAN libraries to access pages,
pretending to be a client. Said connection can input information into
fields, even store cookies for session ID between pages.

As an addendum to this:

Test::WWW::Mechanize

would be my first port of call.



If you don't already have an automated testing environment for your web
application, it's rather late to start developing one.

He's probably inherited a large and rather crufty application and wants
to make sure nothing breaks as he tries to knock it into shape. Best of
luck :)

Thanks for the tips! I had seen a couple of these tools around, but
wasn't sure where to start. And yes, you're right, I didn't create
18,000 pages without a test plan. That was someone else.

Larry

.