[Windmill-dev] Selenium conversion?

[Mikeal Rogers]

On Oct 12, 2007, at 3:46 PM, Aahz wrote:

> What does it take to convert from Selenium to Windmill?  (Please  
> let me
> know if I missed something -- I did look through the wiki and docs.)

We want to write a script to convert "Selenese" to windmill tests but  
we haven't yet. The process right now is purely manual, but we  
implement all the same functionality as Selenium so you won't hit a  
wall in terms of what you can automated and windmill.

Perhaps Adam could write up an appendix in the windmill book  
discussing the differences between the two API's to help people with  
this conversion?

>
> Where exactly is Python 2.5 needed?  We currently use Selenium in a  
> pure
> server-hosted mode, and our servers only have Python 2.2 and 2.3
> available.

So here you'll have two problems actually.

The 0.2 release of windmill has a one to one relationship between the  
service and the browser you're testing. So you can run it as a hosted  
server as part of your infrastructure. This feature is already in the  
bucket for 0.3.

Most of the python incompatibility isn't due to language features as  
much as changes in the standard library. I don't just mean that we  
require some modules that are now included in the standard library,  
that's easy enough to fix, but what is difficult is the changes to  
the API in some standard library modules between python versions. I  
can't remember all of them offhand but urlparse comes to mind first  
and foremost.

We're a pretty small team right now and taking on the work of  
supporting older versions of python just wasn't something we had time  
to commit to. The next release is going to include a lot of re- 
factoring and to keep that work running quickly i doubt we'll change  
this policy. After 0.3 we'll be more than happy to accept patches for  
older versions of python but as policy for the project I doubt we'll  
be committing to support for pre-2.5 releases of python unless we see  
an overwhelming need for it and some solid contributors to help with  
the work.

Thanks for your interest in the project, I'm sorry it doesn't seem to  
quite be where you need it yet.

-Mikeal