João Prado Maia’s Weblog

Simon Perkins of Simtec Ltd (makers of the HttpWatch plugin for Internet Explorer that I mentioned before) was kind enough to get in touch with me via email about my wishlist for YSlow / HttpWatch / AOL Pagetest.

He wasn’t familiar with Selenium, but said that it might be possible to hook up HttpWatch to retrieve performance data dynamically. He pointed to a blog post describing how to do so with Watir, an automated web testing tool written in Ruby. Simtec even has a tutorial about this on their own web site.

While that does sound interesting, it looks like Watir interfaces with HttpWatch with a COM object on Windows, and that’s how it gets the performance information.

The way to do this integration with Selenium would be to expose a set of JavaScript APIs (maybe the same set of objects available through the COM layer?), so one could write JavaScript code to export the HttpWatch information. That’s really what I would love to see.

If that was available, I could write a simple Selenium RC test suite in PHP, remote control a set of browsers from my Linux box, and get access to this performance data from HttpWatch by simply running some JavaScript function.

Zachary Fox (from Alert Logic too) wrote a very good tutorial on how to run Selenium RC to execute unit tests in a team environment.

If you have multiple users running unit tests concurrently against the same Selenium RC server, some nasty things may happen. Zach explains how to properly setup multiple Selenium RC servers, so everyone can work on their own server.

FirePHP seems like a very cool project, allowing PHP developers to debug applications without having to disrupt the normal process of a script. It works by sending the debug content to the browser in special HTTP headers, and the Firefox extension add-on to Firebug will parse those and display them in a special panel within Firebug.

It’s so useful I’m going to install this right now. I can’t believe nobody else thought about doing this before!

Ludwig Pettersson has a really good overview of the Google Charts API, and how you can integrate your PHP scripts with it. He created a PHP library that wraps around the API, and makes it really easy to generate graphs that way.

I’m not sure if I would move away from JpGraph to this new library, but it seems really cool no matter what. I guess it could be an option if you wanted to avoid doing all of the manual work associated with different types of graphs, and offload some graph generation to Google.

Ilia Alshanetsky gave a very interesting presentation at PHP Quebec on the new features planned for PHP 5.3.

Looks like we will finally get namespace support in PHP.