[lug] expect like tool for a website

Nate Duehr nate at natetech.com
Tue Aug 17 02:56:03 MDT 2004


On Tuesday 17 August 2004 00:16, David Morris wrote:

> If you *must* have the GUI automation mechanism, I know such
> things exist but I've never dealt with them...but I suspect
> intelligent automation won't be possible (e.g. only a
> fixed-pattern of clicks, not clicks based on application
> content).

Some of them do understand differences in returned content.  Personally, quite 
a long time ago I messed around with Freshwater Software's SiteScope tool -- 
it was designed for site monitoring, but it actually had a pretty robust 
scripting engine under the hood that could do different things depending on 
the output of a website, and you could "teach" it by just clicking your way 
through the site... it would learn the underlying links and "do the right 
thing".

It was designed so that you could teach it how to navigate a website and then 
use a completely separate piece to see that your input data (simulating an 
end-user) had actually made it into the back-end, be that a database, or 
whatever.

But they've been eaten up by a larger company and their software is an order 
of magnitude (or two!) more expensive than when I was using it.

I'm sure there has to be something else out there that could do similar things 
but I've never seen a free or Free one, yet.  (And haven't been looking.)

--
Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com



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