Considering 99% of the websites/web applications has a part which send e-mails (like contact or sign-up pages), "testing if e-mails can be sent or not" is a frequent task.

Papercut is an open source simplified SMTP server, created specially for local testing purposes, that only receives messages & allows you to see the messages it receives.

It can sit in the system tray & when a new message is received, a balloon message will show up to let you know.

Another good thing is, Papercut is very light & doesn't have an installer, just an .exe that works when clicked.

Optionally, it is possible to bind the application to a specific IP address or a port other than 25.

To sum up, the application is very handy for anyone who is testing e-mail sending functionality of their web applications locally & doesn't want to deal with any other setup or wait for the test e-mails to arrive.

Automated web application testing is done very rarely & it is generally thought as an unnecessary + hard to setup system.

Truth is, automated testing is a must, because it saves so much time during development & when the project is live. Also, with the right tools, it is generally very easy to setup.

Using testing tools, once the scenarios are created, you can:

• test every feature of the whole application with a click
• get written reports instantly with the error logs
• measure the capacity of your web application on every step
• get a continiously-watched, less-problematic web application as the result

There are 2 important web application tests to measure if everything is working (and will work) on your website:

• Functionality testing: using record-playbacks or scripting, a tool can browse your website, fill forms, click on the links you want & generate a report for you
• Load/stress testing: even if a web application is working ok with 1 or 10 users, it can show totally different attitudes (like bottlenecks in resource usage) when there are 100 or 1000 active users.

So, here is a collection of 15 Free Functionality And Load Testing Solutions For Web Applications to create better online experiences:

Functionality Testing

SeleniumHQ

Selenium has various projects that can be combined with each other to create a robust testing environment.

• Selenium IDE: a Firefox add-on to record and playback tests in Firefox.
• Selenium Remote Control: a client/server system to control web browsers locally or on other computers, using almost any programming language and testing framework.
• Selenium Grid: like Selenium Remote Control but runs tests on many servers at the same time.
• Selenium Core: Javascript-based testing system.

Also there are Selenium projects specifically for Rails, Ruby & Eclipse.

Watir

Watir is a set of Ruby libraries which drives browsers just like people. It clicks links, fills in forms, presses buttons. And, it also checks results to report back.

Watir supports:

• IE, Firefox, Chrome on Windows
• Firefox on Mac and Linux
• Safari on Mac
• Flash testing with Firefox

There is also Watij, which is an enhanced version of Watir with Java.

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