This purpose of this release is to work with the helios release and contains a few bug minor fixes.

A few other improvements were done to improve the code coverage for some plugins that were not tested too well.

Forthcoming releases will improve on the code coverage. Well, the irony.

An embedded console or an interpreter is a very powerful tool, it allows you to do some very interesting things with your software as it is running, play around with it, tweak it and anything else you can ever imagine. All of this without the edit-save-compile-relaunch cycle.

Lately I’ve been working on an embedded console for eclipse. The primary motivation was to try out scripting approaches for SWTBot. But I soon realized that I was using it for more than just scripting tests. I was using it to learn how eclipse works, try out different approaches to decide which one is best.

Some of the features include code completion, history lookup. This is possible using jruby’s objectspace and the readline support.

Here’s a small teaser video of what you can do with it an embedded jruby console for eclipse.

The update site url is here http://dl.swtbot.org/update-site

The example here uses SWTBot APIs. But there’s nothing stopping you from using anything else in any of your other plugins.

Ganymede is now almost 2 years old and the last bug fix release was in Feb 2009.

There has been a Galileo release of Eclipse in the Summer of 2009, and there is a new release Helios coming up the horizon.

Given this situation, it is very difficult to continue to provide a light weight testing tool that works across 3 different versions of eclipse on 4 different platforms linux, windows and macosx(carbon/cocoa) while backporting APIs that only work on newer eclipse versions.

In light of this, I’m considering dropping support for eclipse 3.4 for future releases. I’m happy to assist anyone wanting to contribute efforts towards maintaining a release of SWTBot for Ganymede.

The v2.0.0.568 of SWTBot made last night would be the last that supports Ganymede.

My mom would rather use a mac over a gentoo. A systems admin would rather use redhat over a mac on a production machine.

It is also important to say “NO” to people who are not your users. Almost all software at eclipse.org are frameworks, tools and app servers written primarily for developers.

The way software and API is designed for the developer is different from how it’s developed for the non-developer (most of the times). SWTBot was originally and still is primarily a test-automation tool for use by QAs to automate test cases. The APIs are designed to be extremely intuitive, simple and easy to extend by QAs by merely looking at examples and not having to read API documentation.

Some context is in order if you haven’t had the opportunity to work closely with QAs before. Most QAs I’ve met understand customer requirements, understand the software and what the customers want out of it. I like to treat them as end users of the buggy software I build. They may not understand SWT threading, the eclipse ui and platform, OSGi and how TCP packets travel across the corporate firewall over to a load distributor in front of a cloud hosted at a datacenter on the other side of the continent. Try explaining a “org.eclipse.swt.SWTException: Invalid thread access” to a QA and you’ll get interesting looks.

QAs are good at finding bugs in whatever software they are testing. Testing all of the software is time consuming, not to mention testing backward compatibility with older software. Nobody likes clicking around the same navigation path in the UI all the time.

QAs like exploring interesting ways to use the software and ensure that it works consistently as software evolves over time. The traditional favorites have been the ‘heavy weight’ automation tools like HP’s QTP, IBM’s Rational Robot, Borland’s SilkTest and the open source ‘light weight’ tools like selenium, sahi, and a lot others.

Each of these tools has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the most powerful features of each of these toolchains is the ability to author scripts in a dynamic language. The commercial vendors use vbscript or some other variant of the language, and provide some forms of integration with defect tracking tools. The open source tools are primarily light weight, use the languages like javascript, ruby, python and don’t integrate much with anything but your IDE and things like ant or rake.

The end goal is to make SWTBot an extremely good, open source, light weight tool for QAs to automate tests, and be just about useful for developers to write simple test cases with and not something in between that neither of them like.

As part of evolving SWTBot APIs we need to ensure that we stay true to our goal. This sometimes means saying NO to feature requests and even patches from developers if it hurts the non-developers.

A listing of some of the new features available:

Bug 263036 – SWTBot finally has an icon that was missing since two years!
Bug 269919 – Added support for toggle buttons
Bug 271246 – Better support for handling editors. This should serve as a good start towards providing support for multipage, forms based editors
Bug 271132 – Using Display#post() to support sending native click events instead of fake events. This is still work in progress and not all widgets support native events yet.
Bug 273624 – Use native keyboard events for typing. SWTBot currently defaults to using AWT robot. SWT’s Dispay#post() is available as well — it is however buggy across platforms and swt versions. Since SWTBot uses native keyboard events, it needs to understand various Keyboard Layouts.
Bug 267189 – Support capturing screenshots of widgets.
Bug 277093 – Support for Link widgets.

There are also a lot of minor bugs that were fixed in this release.

Download the jruby source zip, extract it and open the build.xml file, search for “rspec” (there’s two occurences) and you’ll find that it’s passed in as an argument to the gem installer, add in another line with “cucumber”:

<target name="install-gems">
  <property name="jruby.home" value="${basedir}"/>
  <java classname="org.jruby.Main" fork="true" maxmemory="${jruby.launch.memory}" failonerror="true">
    <classpath refid="build.classpath"/>
    <classpath path="${jruby.classes.dir}"/>
    <sysproperty key="jruby.home" value="${jruby.home}"/>
    <arg value="--command"/>
    <arg value="maybe_install_gems"/>
    <arg value="rspec"/>
    <arg value="rake"/>
    <arg value="cucumber"/> <!-- add cucumber -->
    <arg value="--env-shebang"/>
  </java>
</target>

Then run ant:

$ ant jar-complete

To verify that everything is fine:

$ java -jar lib/jruby-complete.jar -S gem list

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

builder (2.1.2)
cucumber (0.2.3)
diff-lcs (1.1.2)
polyglot (0.2.5)
rake (0.8.4)
rspec (1.2.2)
sources (0.0.1)
term-ansicolor (1.0.3)
treetop (1.2.5)

Great we’ve now managed to package jruby-in-a-jar with some additional gems. Now to run cucumber on jruby in eclipse.

There is a bit of documentation sitting at the old home that needs to move to eclipse.org. I’m hoping to move this over in the next couple of days.

The sourcecode will also move during the course of the week. I’m busy renaming plugin IDs and packages to use the org.eclipse.swtbot namespace. Meanwhile you can participate on the newsgroups.

Cheers!

Everyone is invited to comment on and/or join the project. Please send all feedback to the SWTBot newsgroup (web link).

See you all there.

Update site: http://swtbot.sourceforge.net/latest/update-site/

SWTBot 1.2.0 is the 3rd of the 1.x releases of SWTBot was released last night, and there have already been about 200 downloads by the time of writing this blog post.

SWTBot has always believed in release early release often mantra, and pushes out nightly builds out of CruiseControl. From the download stats I’m looking at, there are more downloads of the nightly build than the ‘stable’ available on the sourceforge mirrors.

The highlight of the release is support for view menus and view toolbar.

Thanks to the contributors and adoptors, for patches, criticism, and suggestions for improvement. The release has fixed about 42 issues.

Read more on the detailed release notes and the changelog.

All you need to do is execute:

ant -listener com.google.code.ant.growlnotify.GrowlListener

And you’ll need is the growlnotify binary somewhere on your path, this is bundled with the Growl binary dmg.