Ketan's Musings

A long pending request from swtbot users has been support for GEF. The SWTBot4GEF project was created as a sandbox to see how feasible things were in the GEF world.

Mariot Chauvin recently polished the initial contribution from David Green and released a version 0.1 of the gef support. We’re working towards integrating this as part of swtbot and you should hear more about it once the IP process is done

Getting started with SWTBot is a unique experience for a lot of users, and myself. Unlike most other projects hosted at eclipse.org, it’s an Eclipse UI testing tool written for primarily for testers to be able to write automated tests.

In this regard the users of swtbot are a bit special. Most of them understand testing and the principles associated with testing but do not necessarily understand swt, threading models and the workbench and platform internals. Getting such users to use eclipse, create test plugins and write tests in java involves more than just documentation and screenshots.

Mohammed recently posted two such 5 minute videos. Getting started with swtbot in under 5 minutes, and run your UI tests in a headless build from within ant.

A video is worth a thousand images

… and move to newer dope…

I just realized that I had about 58 eclipse SDKs downloaded on my hard drive and 22 instances of different versions of eclipse. That was a whooping 9GB for the sdk downloads and 6.5GB for the extracted versions. Time to move to newer dope

Similar was the case on the cruise based build grid that tested SWTBot from all versions starting from eclipse 3.2 upwards to the latest RC build on all platforms — linux-gtk/linux-gtk-64/win32/macosx-carbon.

Eclipsetasy

You can download the latest and greatest from the SWTBot download page.

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.

SWTBot has finally moved to eclipse.org.

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!