April 2011 Monthly Meeting Summary
Topic:
HEADLESS BROWSER TOOLS FOR WEB 2.0 LOAD TESTING -
Presentation by Gopal Addada and Frank Hurley, Cigital Inc.
- Issues in load testing Ajax web apps
- Majority of the AJAX applications use JavaScript heavy libraries
- Existing open-source load test tools like Jmeter and Grinder do not support JavaScript
- Load testing tool considerations
- Web Load test tools need "Virtual User" or "Virtual Browser"
- Using tools like Selenium and Watir for load testing is not appropriate as they work on a real browser (IE/Firefox/Chrome)
- Need a tool that simulates a real browser and supports JavaScript
- Using HTMLUnit and WebTest
- HTMLUnit (and WebTest) are relevant functional test tools for the purpose as they provide good JS support
- Widely used and constanly updated to support latest Ajax frameworks (large user base and many Committers)
- Load testing Ajax can be achieved by Multi-threading HTMLUnit tests
- We will also discuss the limitations of this approach and proposed future work.
Bios:
Gopal Addada works as consultant at Cigital Inc. His areas of expertise include functional and load test automation and network security. Gopal has extensive experince in developing custom test tools using Java. Prior to joining Cigital, Gopal has worked at MelbourneIT DBS, VeriSign and Center for Secure Information Systems. Gopal has Masters degrees in Information Security and Information Systems, both from George Mason University.
Frank Hurley is a Technical Manager with Cigital. His areas of expertise include software testing and development as well as software security. Mr. Hurley has been responsible for managing QA teams for various software development efforts, and he has developed various test solutions including: custom load and performance test tools for financial trading systems; automated test tools for database integrity testing, and an automated testing platform for embedded control systems for a major process instrumentation company.
Cigital, Inc. is a leading software security and quality consulting firm established in 1992, headquartered in Dulles, VA.
Took place on: Wed. April 13 2011 6:30 PM
Attendance: 22
Meeting Notes:
- There was some initial discussion of various AJAX frameworks (GWT, jQuery, MochiKit, Adobe Flex, Dojo, YUI)
and which automation tools do (or claim to) handle them, and which do not handle them.
- There was some discussion of the basics of AJAX
- It was mentioned that Canoo WebTest was built on HTMLUnit.
- It was mentioned that HTMLUnit is regularly updated including its handling of the various AJAX frameworks.
- HTTPUnit does not have javascript support while HTMLUnit does.
- HTMLUnit does not have built-in reporting capabilities, and does not support Adobe Flash, Silverlight, WPF
- Multithreading capabilities were of course important; up to 200 threads per VM were tried.
- It was mentioned that the TestNG tool has good thread pool management capabilities
- The pdf file from the presentation is available (0.6 MB file size).
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