If you are thinking about testing web apps, you might get interested in taking and comparing screen shots. I've been involved with Selenium RC a bit these days, a test automation tool for web apps. Selenium RC (or SRC for short) offers a captureScreenshot facility. The problem was: If you want to compare images mechanically, you want to make sure they contain only what you are interested in - the web page under test. The SRC command captures the whole screen. So I put a bit of time and effort into having SRC take screen shots from the browser page only. If possible, no desktop, no other windows, no chrome. This makes the screen images smaller and rips off the visual noise that will spoil the comparisons. What we have come up with seems to work so far, and if you are interested in the technical details, surf over to a post on Selenium RC's user forum.

If this works out nicely we might set up a test automation to test low-level and widget-level rendering capabilities of qooxdoo. With a few suitable test apps (like those from the DemoBrowser) we will run through the test once, take all the screenshots, making sure the pics taken are correct. Then run the tests automatically, taking the same screenshots again and comparing them to the master copies. Doing this again and again while developing the framework we should finally get a nice regression test. With this infrastructure you can compare the images directly (e.g. using tools from the ImageMagick suite), compare them on the basis of their digest (MD5, SHA), throw away the correct ones, keep the problematic for human inspection, create "diff" images and so on.

Sounds like fun.

We are happy to announce a comprehensive maintenance release qooxdoo 0.7.3. It includes many bugfixes and improvements that any qooxdoo application should benefit from. It is recommended that existing custom applications built with previous qooxdoo versions are being migrated to this stable and mature release.

Besides the many bugfixes, there are a few new features to mention:

• Cross-browser logging features based on Firebug Lite
• A source-code validation utility similar to JSLint, executed by a simple "make lint"
• Re-worked feedreader to demonstrate best practices for application development
• Early preview of the next-generation build tool generator2.

For more information about the many bugfixes and other improvements of 0.7.3 please see the detailed release notes. Be careful that a very small number of changes (particularly related to theming the virtual table widget) might effect your custom application and require manual adjustments. Other than that migration to the current release should be fairly easy, since the (semi-)automatic migration support doesn't really have anything to cover. Most changes were made "under the hood".

Thanks to all the people that not only noticed some problems, but made them known to everybody else by either posting to the mailing list or opening a ticket in bugzilla. Some community members took the chance to further analyse, and fix some issues, and contribute them back to the project. Whatever your involvement into this open source project is, it is highly appreciated.

Enjoy the new release!

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