Announcing Headless Testling | Hacker News Reader

Announcing Headless Testling

catonmat.net

69 pointsAnon8412 comments

The more the merrier, but this puts you about 2 years behind Sauce Labs and even further behind Selenium as a whole. Also, since the whole app seems to be based on stackVM, a better explanation of what that is would be helpful.

EDIT: fair enough that testingly isn't based on stackVM, I didn't think that was very clear on your site. And you still don't explain what stackVM is. And to whoever downvoted me - I have done enough evaluations of automated test tools to know those should be among first questions that any serious user would ask. Aside from being based on Node, your product should differentiate itself better from the free, more mature tool and it would help to know more about the infrastructure it's based upon.

EDIT 2: Okay, 2 downvotes later, I'm cranky about this. I'm a professional in this field (who would be involved in purchasing decisions with the software you sell) trying to give you free advice. I'm sorry if it's not glowing praise, but you should differentiate yourself from Selenium because it seems very similar at first glance, explain what stackVM is, and put together a more professional looking website for all of them.

Browserling is based on StackVM. Testling is not.

Edit: StackVM is this thing that puts VNC in your browser (see demo videos at www.stackvm.com). We used StackVM to build Browserling. We installed browsers on Windows and used StackVM code so that you can use those browsers in your browser. Now with Testling we only run browsers on Windows, without VNC. So when you write a test, we launch a browser on Windows and run the test in it, then we collect the test results and send them back to you.

I don't really understand why you're comparing automation testing (Selenium) with Javascript unit testing?

Testling is both!

Agreed - if testling/browserling are not positioned for functional testing, I'm sorry for not catching on to that. In my defense, you could easily market it as a functional testing tool (sort of how Selenium could support unit testing in the browser since it can modify the dom letting you mock out external calls, even though it's not a natural fit for the tool)

Also, thanks for explaining stackVM. That's a pretty cool idea - it's not a problem for me where I am now, but anecdotally the flash/java console plugins can run into issues with corporate firewalls and browser security policies so something based on html5 canvases / http long polling (if I'm not assuming too much on the implementation side) could help solve that.

minimalist testing FTW! (e.g. node-tap style). cant wait for a way for this to automatically run for me every time i update my githubz and then send me robot pictures representing my test status (sad robots for failing tests, happy robots for passing tests)

Soon!

Looks interesting. Kinda like what Jasmine provides (no DOM required), but allows you to target real browsers.

Except it's not because it's based on JSDOM, which isn't going to simulate any browsers with real accuracy. You're better off biting the bullet and descending into the painful world of Selenium WebDriver testing, sadly.

Are you saying Testling uses jsdom? Because it doesn't, it actually runs in real browsers.

Really cool, can one integrate something like Sinon (http://sinonjs.org) with this to get spies, mocks, etc? I didn't see a mention of this in the docs.

Edit: Hrm, my bad. Looks like you can just require() standalone file dependancies?

Yes, you can! You just module.export your stuff in the standalone files, then tar it all together and run the test!

    tar -cf- test.js module1.js module2.js | curl -sSNT- testling.com/?browsers=iexplore/9.0,chrome/15.0

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