The Robot Framework is a very versatile tool and never confronted us with unsolvable problems so far. In some regards it still feels a little rough and needs some polishing, to make development and maintenance of automated tests more efficient. One of those areas is the integration into the well known development environment. There is the Robot IDE, but this only covers a fraction of my requirements. The following will show, how easily the Robot Framework and your own Java Keywords can be integrated in Maven and Eclipse.
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We are using the Robot Framework for quite some time now for our automated acceptance tests with very good results. Personally I am using the Robot Framework already for a bit longer time and I find its fundametal concepts really extremely convincing. The generic test libraries (for example related to testing Selenium or SSH) that are freely available are another strength of the tool. But up to now a generic keyword library for testing databases was missing. I think I have written such a library already three times for two different companies, because at the end of the day almost every application is using a database. This means that automated tests should – at least random – check if data is properly written to the database. This way an application can be really tested end-to-end .
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Screenshot are incredibely helpful when doing user interface tests, to get fast feedback why a test has failed. Selenium provides several great opportunities to do exactly that. But, there are many problems related to that at the moment, from which some will discussed, even solved in the following post. read more…

Selenium is a very efficient tool for testing web sites. The Selenium-IDE, that comes as a plugin to Firefox, makes it easy to record the required steps of a test. And to achieve real test automation Selenium is often integrated with some agile testing tool like the Robot Framework that comes with its own implementation of the Selenium API.

But the automated testing of web sites is thwarted heavily once a page is opened that is signed with SSL, but where the certificate has not been authorized properly. The browser slams on the brakes and opens a dialogue asking the user to accept the certificate. This is of course not a desirable behaviour for an automated test.
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This is a mystery story of Jython, Hudson and Tomcat. Our environment for continuous integration is based on the Robot Framework and Hudson, where Hudson is running on a Tomcat-Server under Linux. From here our Robot-Tests are started and as we are implementing our Tests (Keywords) in Java we are using Jython for this.
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Everyone working with Selenium probably knows some problems when testing “complicated” web sites. Complicated here often means extensive use of JavaScript. For such web sites tests recorded with the Selenium IDE cannot be executed successfully. But what is worse: Sometimes one can simply not find a proper XPath oder DOM expression to perform some action on an element. For those cases simulating a “native keystroke” could be the last resort indeed.
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