[jbosstools-dev] Window Tester as alternative to SWTBot ?

[Mickael Istria]

Hi all,

During EclipseCon Europe, I chatted with a guy who's a pure 
technology-agnostic guy (not a contributor, not a guru, not an 
evangelist, just a user who gives his user story in an objective way). 
He used to use SWTBot to write tests, but he started using Google 
WindowTester Pro [1] instead since it got released under EPL by Google 
[2]. He told me that WindowTester Pro has a bot API quite similar to 
SWTBot, also compatible with JUnit and Tycho; and the most interesting 
point is that Window Tester contains a recorder which allows to record 
tests pretty easily. This could help us to write tests, but also be used 
by end-users to provide their failing scenarios as WindowTester scenarios.
The recorder simply logs all SWT events and tries to turn meaningful 
sequences of Events to user-grained UI operations (such as click). I was 
reported that 90% of code written by the recorder is good for industrial 
usage, the 10 remaining % requires some refactoring and Java coding; and 
that using WindowTester Pro takes half the time as recording+writing 
SWTBot tests to provide exactly the same thing, with the same level of 
(re)usability and maintainability.
The only "darker" point I know against this tool is that it's not (yet?) 
part of the Eclipse Foundation projects, it's still a Google one. But I 
think that with some insistence, this project can get into the 
Foundation with all the advantages that comes with it (mainly openness).

This definitely seems to be a project we should evaluate for JBoss 
Tools. I opened this ticket to track this suggestion: 
https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBIDE-12953 so anyone who's interested 
can go there and provide some additional feedback/ideas on whether 
WindowTester Pro is good for JBoss Tools.

Cheers,

[1] http://code.google.com/p/windowtester/ 
https://developers.google.com/java-dev-tools/wintester/html/
[2] 
http://google-opensource.blogspot.de/2012/03/announcing-windowtester-open-source.html
-- 
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat <http://www.jboss.org/tools>
My blog <http://mickaelistria.wordpress.com> - My Tweets 
<http://twitter.com/mickaelistria>
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