No Fluff Iowa - Day 3 (Selenium Rocks!!!)
Day 3 at No Fluff Just Stuff at the Central Iowa Symposium in Des Moines was a great way to end (even though I didnât win the Sony PSP). I started off the morning by attending âGive the DB a Break! Peformance & Scalabilityâ from Dion Almaer. Dion had some awesome content in this session, and I was most interested in the caching architectures for taking load off of our db. Iâm very interested in Tangosol Coherence after he built it up so much. Distributed cluster caching is something we must get deployed soon on our app.
My second session was Neal Fordâs âAdvanced Enterprise Debugging Techniquesâ. The âAdvancedâ word didnât really play in, as he covered debugging from the ground up. His bits about jdb and classloader hierarchy were ok. Then he showed us ThoughtWorksâ Selenium testing product⊠WOW!!! Itâs an open source testing engine, that runs in JavaScript! This means it tests in any browser that you tell it to. It actually tests from the userâs point of view! Iâm very excited, because we didnât want to throw down the cash for Silk or Mercury. You really have to see the demo for Selenium. Itâs going to change our user acceptance processes very quickly (from manual to automated). I downloaded and played with Selenium for 2 hours today, and it was even easier than I had predicted. The only shortfall I could find was it doesnât handle mouse moving, so it doesnât fully test things like dynamic menus that only work on hover, but this is a small limitation that could be fixed as Selenium is only in a 0.5 release.
That ended our weekend in Des Moines (after a quick Web Tier BOF with Neal Ford & Scott Davis). I would have attended Scottâs Testing the Web Tier sessions, but we had to get back to Omaha. Iâve talked a little to Jay Zimmerman, and hopefully they can bring NFJS to Omaha next year! Great conference, I totally recommend it to everyone, and Iâll be going again next year!