[Windmill-dev] Python test suites

[Robert Leftwich]

On Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:14:41 -0800, "Mikeal Rogers"
<mikeal at osafoundation.org> said:
> I think some history brings this in to context.

It does. 

There is some excellent information that should be added to the
book/wiki in some form!

> I don't think any of these matter. The question honestly is "do you  
> know python?" and "would you prefer working with python test files  
> rather than a markup?".

As someone comfortable with python this was my decision point - I
basically just wanted to know if I would be missing anything by not
using json (or vice versa).

> The JavaScript framework shines in that it has access to well,  
> JavaScript, and the entirety of your webapp and every object  
> available. We have a huge range of testability in the windmill API  
> available from any language, but there is a point at which there isn't  
> anything we can do. If something is so dynamic and unpredictable that  
> you need a good amount of code to get each id, and it's not something  
> that is reusable enough to be an extension. This sounds like some way  
> off use case but it really isn't. Web apps are getting incredibly  
> complex, and this case is coming up more and more often.

In my case I got to that situation fairly quickly. Some extensions I
needed to write were *very* specific to a test or at least to a single
page and I'm starting to wonder if using the JavaScript framework is the
way to go. As the likelihood of requiring more test/page specific
extensions is high, it might be a better investment to choose the JS
approach over python, Although, the python tests are a lot more readable
to me than the js/json examples I've seen. 

I wonder if there might be an advantage in keeping the extensions and
the Python tests close together and perhaps more dynamic, i.e. to be 
able to define extensions in the Python setup_module() or even as some 
sort of decorator, rather than requiring completely separate files and 
directories?

Robert