Local E-mail Testing For Web Apps.: Papercut

Umut M. — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:01:54 +0000

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.

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15 Free Functionality And Load Testing Tools For Web Applications

Umut M. — Tue, 12 May 2009 05:39:35 +0000

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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.

ActiWATE

A Java-based platform for easing the website test automation process.

ActiWATE emulates brower-based actions & makes it possible to create action/result based scenarios.

It supports http-https & Ajax requests.

WebDriver

WebDriver is a clean, fast framework, created by the Google team, for automated testing of web applications.

It offers a very real-like testing environment as it uses whichever mechanism is most appropriate to control the browser. For Firefox, this means that WebDriver is implemented as an extension. For IE, it makes use of IE’s automation controls.

For a full article on WebDriver, click here.

HtmlUnit

This is one of the most popular solutions that is used for testing purposes or to retrieve information from web sites.

It has a good JavaScript support (which is constantly improving) and can work with jQuery, MooTools, Prototype, Dojo, etc. too.

HtmlUnit can be configured to simulate IE or Firefox, has support for cookies, get-post requets & much more.

Sahi

Sahi is a very easy-to-use software that can record and playback scripts. And, it runs on any modern browser.

The application supports Ajax and dynamic applications. It provides logging in every step & has an automatic html reporting with error logs.

OttoMate

This is a suite of six Mac OS X Automator Actions that contains everything needed to graphically configure automated, repeatable user-acceptance tests for web-based applications.

The OttoMate Actions uses Safari, run your web application through by commanding Safari to visit your site, click links and buttons, fill out and submit web forms, etc.

IeUnit

IeUnit is a framework whic uses JavaScript to test logical behaviors of web pages.

By using only JS, test cases can be easily written for any website.

FWPTT

FWPTT is a web application tester program for load testing web applications which can record normal and Ajax requests.

Using a proxy server, the sprogram let’s user to record, playback & log the browsing actions.

Load Testing

Pylot

Pylot is an open source tool which runs HTTP load tests for testing performance and scalability of web services.

It generates concurrent load (HTTP Requests), verifies server responses, and produces reports with metrics. Tests suites are executed and monitored from a GUI or shell/console.

Tsung

Tsung can be used to stress almost any kind of server including:

HTTP
WebDAV
SOAP
PostgreSQL, MySQL
LDAP
Jabber/XMPP servers.

Several IP addresses can be used on a single machine using the underlying OS IP Aliasing& HTTP reports are generated during the tests.

Apache JMeter

Apache JMeter may be used to test performance both on static and dynamic resources. Besides HTTP, it can connect to databases, POP3 & more.

Siege

Siege is an http regression testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure the performance of their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet.

It supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP and HTTPS protocols. It allows the user hit a web server with a configurable number of concurrent simulated users.

Siege was written on GNU/Linux and has been successfully ported to AIX, BSD, HP-UX and Solaris.

The Grinder

The Grinder is a Java load testing framework that makes it easy to run a distributed test using many load injector machines.

Tests are written in Jython scripting language. It has an automatic management of client connections and cookies.

Stress Tools By Microsoft

Microsoft offers 2 tools for stress testing IIS servers:

IIS 6 Web Capacity Analysis Tool (The IIS 6.0 Resource Kit Tools include WCAT) / IIS 7.0 Web Capacity Analysis tool
Web Application Stress Tool