AFT - Anteater: Ant Functional Testing / News: Recent posts

As often happens with open-source projects, the developers of Anteater scratched their itch, got bored and moved on. The project is not dead, but 'retired', in the sense that if someone wants to work on further development, they're welcome to. Just ask for CVS access on the list, or mail me privately.

Unlike most open-source projects, Anteater goes into retirement in a healthy working state. It is quite stable, has plenty of up-to-date documentation, and reached an advanced level of functionality. The latest release (0.9.16) contains all that is in CVS.... read more

With the latest 0.9.12 release, the website has been updated to list all the examples:

http://aft.sourceforge.net/examples/

If you have IE5.5+ or Mozilla, a client-side XSLT stylesheet should provide links for Anteater and Ant elements back to their respective web pages.

--Jeff

The latest release fixes a number of bugs, and adds the ability to use Jelly scripts to dynamically create data in Anteater.

--Jeff

I've just uploaded the 0.9.9.1 distribution, containing some bugfixes:

- The 'sessiondemo.war' file was corrupt in the 0.9.9 distribution,
causing the 'deploy.xml' example script to fail.
- Fixed the Ant generation of HTML and PDF docs.
- Fixed bug in the 'haltonerror' logic. Previously, haltonerror only
worked if the last (or only) test gave an error. Now, any test in the
matcher triggers haltonerror.
- Fixed bug where XML files with DTDs specified in their DOCTYPE
declarations didn't parse.... read more

The new website is up! Point your browser to http://aft.sourceforge.net/, and have a look around. There are a few broken PDFs hiding in there, but otherwise it should be working. If you spot anything broken, please let us know on aft-devel.

--Jeff

A long overdue release, containing all sorts of new stuff. Technically, Anteater is now pretty stable, and we're trying to set up a decent website before doing a 1.0 release.

--Jeff

FYI, Anteater will be the subject of a book chapter I'm writing. The book is called "Extreme XML Publishing", published by Manning. The chapter is about functional testing, primarily of Cocoon sites, using Anteater.

--Jeff

I'm now working fulltime on Anteater. Grouping has been implemented, and the website (http://aft.sourceforge.net/) has been substantially updated. A 1.0 release will be made in the next few days.

A much-requested feature: it's now possible to have <httpRequest> tests share a common session, via the <session> nested element. See 'test.xml' for an example of how this is done.

Also, XML logging and HTML reporting is now implemented. The XML logs are in the same format as those from the <junit> task, so we can reuse the <junitreport> task to create some nice-looking HTML reports. An example of a generated report is (temporarily) up at http://aft.sf.net/report/frames/... read more

What is it?

Anteater is an Ant-based functional testing framework for Web
applications and Web services.

Using Anteater you can simulate:

- a Web client, useful when testing normal Web applications

- a Web service or a Web server, for emulating the behavior of a
server when testing a client side

When testing the server side of your application, Anteater acts as a
client to it. You control all the parameters of the HTTP request sent
to the server. When the response from the server comes back, you can
test the response headers or the body, using either regular or XPath
expressions.... read more