WebDriver plus is a simple, powerful browser automation. Built upon the existing python selenium bindings. The main fix is in the expressions for selecting html elements. For backwards compatibility, the existing selectors are verbose. Webdriver uses jquery syntax!
Also nice: reuse browser instances for speed. “Browser pooling”.
Because you can extract html snippets, you can even run your javascript unit tests in python code.
There’s a really nice headless mode, a handier handler around the basic existing one.
See http://webdriverplus.org/ .
He had a great demo. Running tests mostly. But, to great demo effect, also changing the colors of certain DOM elements in your browser from your python prompt. Wow.
How to do it? Just follow the guidelines at https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/SprintHostingHowto
In their case, it started with some ideas over beers at a local Polish user group. They arranged dates and a place and mailed the DSF; Jannis-the-core-developer joined up, hurray. Set up a registration page. Once they hit 40 people they decided to do it.
Don’t forget food and cables. What worked well was have everyone bring their own power adapter, this made sure they had enough. One person sponsored all the tshirt.
They made a google doc with a list of the tickets being worked on. What really helped, btw, was working in pairs and triplets.
2 days, 40 programmers, 40 tickets handled. Total costs: 300 Euro (sponsored by DSF).
They have 100+ deployments, each with their own admin interface. And thus lots of accounts and passwords.
They created django-admin-sso, which redirects to google for an OpenID login. There’s an ‘assignments’ table which matches openids to django accounts.
An advantage is that the actual username/password always uses https (=google), so it gets around some of the you-need-ssl problems.
This year there’s a python conference in Poland: http://pl.pycon.org/2012/
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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