Good day, monks.

I'm trying to go a little XP and automate functional tests. Shortly, I want to say: "go there (url), click that button and make sure it added the correct line to the table over there (url)". Building such a framework seems a big chunk of work, so I found CGI::Test, HTTP::WebTest and HTTP::Monkeywrench. I read the docs, felt a little suspicios and decided to seek for wisdom in the Monastery.

CGI::Test does not work over HTTP, it simulates CGI environment and runs scripts capturing their output and analyzing it. I don't know why the author took that way yet, there's surely a bunch of reasons as CGI::Test is big and probably feature-rich and mature. But that means I won't be able to test anything but real CGI scripts, which should be runable from a local filesystem. The last update to CGI::Test was more than a year ago, so the author is likely to have lost interest in it or it got perfect (version 0.1.3).

The other frameworks look like a nice alternatives, both simpler and work over HTTP. Monkeywrench was last updated in 2000, but has a interface I liked most of all. But the POD is clumsy :)

Due to the number of times I said "but" here I have mixed feelings. Does someone use any of the above-mentioned on a regular basis? What are your impressions? Do they help? Do you people automate functional testing of web-applications at all? There's a lot of commercial web-testing packages available on the market, does somebody here use those?

Maybe unit-testing is enough?

In reply to Functional testing of CGI apps by kappa

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.