My first demo of Selenium was at a lightning talk at STARwest in 2005. I was watching it with one eye and watching the time keeper with the other. Not out of rudeness; I was actually hosting the event. Grig Gheorghiu did the demo and even blogged about it .

At Citcon Sydney last year, I did an informal tool survey and Selenium came out tops by a long way. We had some lightning-style talks at the session but nothing on Selenium.

When I read about the Selenium Users Meetup (SUM), I was excited. When I read the program, I was ecstatic. When I realized the location, I was shattered.

Last year I was able to visit San Franciso for Agile Open California. That’s because I was in Anaheim for STARwest. Now I’m back in Melbourne Australia, so San Fran was out of the question.

I use to be a very strong advocate for SOAPscope. That's before I upgraded from v4.1. to v5.2. Now I have an odd bug where I have to re-enter my licensing information every time I start the server. SOAPscope crashes when I attempt to add certain WSDLs to my project. And the new user interface is much much slower and a bit more clunky looking (making it difficult to navigate).

soapui to the rescue! A co-worker, Steve Keizer, turned me on to soapui yesterday. Then I noticed Chris McMahon had blogged about it (a strong reference in my mind). Within ten minutes, I had it up and running, pointing to my WSDL (the one that crashes SOAPscope), and had executed my first test. And, it's free...

[textile]From the "AutAT Website":http://boss.bekk.no/boss/autat/ ...

AutAT -- An Eclipse Plugin for Automatic Acceptance Testing of Web Applications AutAT * is an open source Eclipse plugin, * makes test driven development of web applications easier, * contains a rich graphical editor for specifying how web-sites should function, * is written using the Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework (GEF),

Selenium Recorder is the precursor to a future release of the Selenium IDE. From the homepage:

Selenium Recorder is a Firefox extention that captures the input from user, and generates Selenium commands. It also supports editing test case files.

[textile]In my "previous posts about SWExplorerAutomation (SWEA)":http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/2592, I addressed a couple of initial problems with getting "SWEA":http://home.comcast.net/~furmana/SWIEAutomation.htm to work on a specific configuration of machine.

Having got past that, I moved on to more interesting things... Specifically, using SWEA under NUnit.

I won't go into the detail of any of the SWEA main features since "Alex Furman":http://www.alexfurman.net does that better than me in his "Flash Demo":http://home.comcast.net/~furmana/SWExplorerAutomation.html and developer documentation available on the "SWEA home page":http://home.comcast.net/~furmana/SWIEAutomation.htm

When should you use SWEA? Well, there are so many different circumstances where it would be appropriate and many where it wouldn't... rather than guess your circumstances, I'll tell you about mine:

[textile]In a "prior post about SWExplorerAutomation (SWEA)":http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/2592 I mentioned a problem (and solution) that occurs if you have applied .NET framework patches in the wrong order.

I have also found another incompatibility, specifically with "MSN Desktop Search":http://toolbar.msn.com

If you have the "MSN Desktop Search":http://toolbar.msn.com installed with the Windows Explorer / Internet Explorer search-bar (and tabbed browsing) the SWEA "Scene Editor" shortcut menu in IE doesn't appear. Although this is a minor hinderence since the short-cut keys still work, I wonder if it might impact other features of SWEA? so I have resolved it as follows...

[textile]While helping someone get started with evaluating "SWExplorerAutomation":http://home.comcast.net/~furmana/SWIEAutomation.htm (I'll call it SEA if you don't mind) on a client's site, we encountered an error almost as soon as we tried to use it... but it turned out that it had nothing to do with the tool and everything to do with a bug in an MS Security Patch... "read on to find out more":http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/2592