Matt RaibleMatt Raible is a Web Developer and Java Champion. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

The Angular Mini-Book The Angular Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with Angular. You'll learn how to develop a bare-bones application, test it, and deploy it. Then you'll move on to adding Bootstrap, Angular Material, continuous integration, and authentication.

Spring Boot is a popular framework for building REST APIs. You'll learn how to integrate Angular with Spring Boot and use security best practices like HTTPS and a content security policy.

For book updates, follow @angular_book on Twitter.

The JHipster Mini-Book The JHipster Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with hip technologies today: Angular, Bootstrap, and Spring Boot. All of these frameworks are wrapped up in an easy-to-use project called JHipster.

This book shows you how to build an app with JHipster, and guides you through the plethora of tools, techniques and options you can use. Furthermore, it explains the UI and API building blocks so you understand the underpinnings of your great application.

For book updates, follow @jhipster-book on Twitter.

10+ YEARS


Over 10 years ago, I wrote my first blog post. Since then, I've authored books, had kids, traveled the world, found Trish and blogged about it all.

The Playoffs Begin

DU Hockey A good weekend of hockey is about to begin: Pioneers Faceoff Against Wisconsin in WCHA Playoffs This Weekend. We have season tickets for tomorrow night's game, but not tonight's. Last night, I did my first search on craigslist and found a bunch - many selling for face value. One guy was giving away on-the-glass seats for free, but I missed him by a couple hours. Needless to say, I found some seats and will be attending tonight's game as well as all the other games this weekend. Go DU!

Update: While the games were good this weekend, they didn't end like I'd hoped. Oh well, better luck next year.

Posted in General at Mar 09 2007, 11:28:43 AM MST

Integrating Selenium with Maven 2

I spent some time this past week integrating Selenium with Maven 2. This post is designed to show you how to do this in your Maven 2 projects.

First of all, there were two types of testing scenarios I wanted to make possible. The first was to allow HTML-based tests that web designers could create and run with Selenium IDE. As far as I know, Selenium IDE is capable of recording and exporting Java-based tests (powered by TestNG or JUnit), but I don't believe it's capable of playing them back. So for Java Developers, I wanted to allow them to write their tests in Java.

To get Maven to run HTML-based tests, the easiest way seems to be using the <selenese> Ant task. I tried Mavenium as well, but it 1) doesn't use the latest version of Selenium RC and 2) reports success when tests fail. Below is a Maven profile that I'm using in an AppFuse-based project to run HTML tests.

<profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>integration-test</id>
        <activation>
            <property>
                <name>!maven.test.skip</name>
            </property>
        </activation>
        <build>
            <plugins>
                <plugin>
                    <groupId>org.codehaus.cargo</groupId>
                    <artifactId>cargo-maven2-plugin</artifactId>
                    <version>0.3-SNAPSHOT</version>
                    <configuration>
                        <wait>${cargo.wait}</wait>
                        <container>
                            <containerId>${cargo.container}</containerId>
                            <!--home>${cargo.container.home}</home-->
                            <zipUrlInstaller>
                                <url>${cargo.container.url}</url>
                                <installDir>${installDir}</installDir>
                            </zipUrlInstaller>
                        </container>
                        <configuration>
                            <home>${project.build.directory}/${cargo.container}/container</home>
                            <properties>
                                <cargo.hostname>${cargo.host}</cargo.hostname>
                                <cargo.servlet.port>${cargo.port}</cargo.servlet.port>
                            </properties>
                        </configuration>
                    </configuration>
                    <executions>
                        <execution>
                            <id>start-container</id>
                            <phase>pre-integration-test</phase>
                            <goals>
                                <goal>start</goal>
                            </goals>
                        </execution>
                        <execution>
                            <id>stop-container</id>
                            <phase>post-integration-test</phase>
                            <goals>
                                <goal>stop</goal>
                            </goals>
                        </execution>
                    </executions>
                </plugin>
                <plugin>
                    <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
                    <executions>
                        <execution>
                            <id>launch-selenium</id>
                            <phase>integration-test</phase>
                            <configuration>
                                <tasks>
                                    <taskdef resource="selenium-ant.properties">
                                        <classpath refid="maven.plugin.classpath"/>
                                    </taskdef>
                                    <selenese suite="src/test/resources/selenium/TestSuite.html"
                                              browser="*firefox" timeoutInSeconds="180" port="5555"
                                              results="${project.build.directory}/selenium-firefox-results.html"
                                              startURL="http://${cargo.host}:${cargo.port}/${project.build.finalName}/"/>
                                </tasks>
                            </configuration>
                            <goals>
                                <goal>run</goal>
                            </goals>
                        </execution>
                    </executions>
                    <dependencies>
                        <dependency>
                            <groupId>ant</groupId>
                            <artifactId>ant-nodeps</artifactId>
                            <version>1.6.5</version>
                        </dependency>
                        <dependency>
                            <groupId>org.openqa.selenium.server</groupId>
                            <artifactId>selenium-server</artifactId>
                            <version>0.9.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
                        </dependency>
                    </dependencies>
                </plugin>
            </plugins>
        </build>
    </profile>
    <profile>
        <id>selenium-ie</id>
        <activation>
            <os>
                <family>windows</family>
            </os>
        </activation>
        <build>
            <plugins>
                <plugin>
                    <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
                    <executions>
                        <execution>
                            <id>launch-selenium</id>
                            <phase>integration-test</phase>
                            <configuration>
                                <tasks>
                                    <taskdef resource="selenium-ant.properties">
                                        <classpath refid="maven.plugin.classpath"/>
                                    </taskdef>
                                    <selenese suite="src/test/resources/selenium/TestSuite.html"
                                              browser="*firefox" timeoutInSeconds="180" port="5555"
                                              results="${project.build.directory}/selenium-firefox-results.html"
                                              startURL="http://${cargo.host}:${cargo.port}/${project.build.finalName}/"/>
                                    <selenese suite="src/test/resources/selenium/TestSuite.html"
                                              browser="*iexplore" timeoutInSeconds="180" port="5555"
                                              results="${project.build.directory}/selenium-ie-results.html"
                                              startURL="http://${cargo.host}:${cargo.port}/${project.build.finalName}/"/>
                                </tasks>
                            </configuration>
                            <goals>
                                <goal>run</goal>
                            </goals>
                        </execution>
                    </executions>
                </plugin>
            </plugins>
        </build>
    </profile>
</profiles>

The above setup will allow you to run Selenium tests in Firefox, and in IE as well when you're on Windows. I tried to get Safari to work on the Mac, but it just opens Safari and hangs.

HTML tests are great for non-programmers, but what about developers that prefer Java and want test reports to be included in the surefire-plugin's reports? That's easy enough. First of all, put your tests in a particular package so they can be excluded from the normal testing cycle. I used a webapp.selenium package. I configured the surefire-plugin to exclude these tests:

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
        <excludes>
            <exclude>**/selenium/*Test.java</exclude>
        </excludes>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

Then I added the newly released selenium-maven-plugin to my "integration-test" profile and configured surefire to run the Selenium Java tests.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
    <artifactId>selenium-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-beta-1</version>  
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>start-selenium</id>
            <phase>pre-integration-test</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>start-server</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <background>true</background>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>
<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>surefire-it</id>
            <phase>integration-test</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>test</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <excludes>
                    <exclude>none</exclude>
                </excludes>
                <includes>
                    <include>**/selenium/*Test.java</include>
                </includes>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

Yeah, Maven can be quite verbose when configuring profiles. I contacted the Maven list to see if it's possible to simplify all this XML, but so far haven't found a solution.

If you'd like to see a pom.xml with the Selenium bits and a profile that runs both HTML and Java-based tests, click here (JavaScript needs to be enabled for this to work).

NOTE: I used 0.9.1-SNAPSHOT of Selenium Server because it solves issues with the latest version of Firefox.

This brings up a related question I asked on the AppFuse mailing list a couple of days ago:

Do you use the Canoo WebTests? If not, how do you do UI testing? If so, would you prefer Selenium?

If you've tried AppFuse 2.x and have an opinion, please add a comment. Personally, I like Selenium, but I like how Canoo WebTest can be somewhat friendly to designers and allow i18n testing with Ant's property file support. With Selenium, you have to use parse/replace or Java tests to do i18n testing. Then again, if you need to test a lot of Ajax functionality, it's likely that Selenium will work much better for you.

Posted in Java at Mar 09 2007, 10:35:04 AM MST 17 Comments