Re: [Fxruby-users] (unit) testing and FXRuby.

[Lyle J. <jl...@cf...>]

Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng wrote:

> Before I started on FOX I used to use Tk, though I have not had much
> success using it with Ruby.  In Tk you could send messages from one
> program to another, or even within the same program, and buttons had
> an action command that effectively clicked the button.  If I want to
> drive a GUI programmatically in FXRuby, what should I be using?

I'm not all that familiar with Tk, and certainly not this aspect of Tk 
that you're describing, so I'm not sure what to say about it. I don't 
guess that FOX has any built-in capabilities for inter-process 
communication between FOX applications (other than of course things like 
drag-and-drop).

GUI testing in general is a gray area, no question about it. At last 
year's Ruby Conference in Seattle, Nathaniel Talbott gave a talk on 
acceptance testing. During the introductory remarks he jokingly remarked 
that he'd considered titling his presentation, "How to test GUIs", 
because he knew that if he did that he was guaranteed to have a large 
audience ;)

> Also, are there ways to interrogate the application so I can assert
> that "clicking ThatWidget means ThisWidget is now visible", etc?
> I'm thinking my debugging process might go more smoothly if I can
> drive the UI consistently.  Are there idioms for this yet?

No, we don't have any kind of higher-level framework for that kind of 
thing, although it sounds like a good idea. I wonder if you might be 
able to leverage some of the work from Xnee:

     http://www.gnu.org/software/xnee

or maybe this Perl module:

     http://sourceforge.net/projects/x11guitest

Of course, those are both X-specific, but it's a start.

Hope this helps,

Lyle