Adam Christian

Working up to the Windmill 1.0 Beta 1 Release, I finally had the opportunity to put some time into making the IDE (that a lot of you live in when in test writing mode) a little bit nicer to look at.

The IDE has been growing organically since 0.1 and there was a lot of functionality hacked into it that wasn’t in the original game plan, so I did what I could to improve the beauty of the CSS/Layout as well as the whole mess of code behind it.

Launching
If you have used our latest release, or are running trunk you know that we have significantly improved the load times for the Windmill IDE. By compressing the JavaScript when the service is instantiated we can simply hand the IDE window one file that contains the vast majority of the required code.

The reason that this makes such a huge performance difference is because we are loading the source via the local windmill proxy and the data size size had very little impact, the overhead was in the browser two connection limit. When you have to pull down ~30 files two at a time it takes its toll and made the IDE feel very sluggish and more like a web page loading than an IDE.

In the process of figuring out exactly what was slowing down the launch time we added some more informative messages and output so you don’t sit there staring at a twirling circle graphic wondering if anything is happening. And to make the experience even more fun, I couldn’t help but implement a progress bar.

General Layout
I removed the toolbar at the bottom of the screen, which I felt it was an irritation for test editing (especially with the drag and droppable actions). It is now in a drop down menu at the top right of the screen, with the rest of the UI access to IDE functions.

Settings and Firebug Lite Improvements
The settings dialog has continued to improve by implementing more useful defaults, adding new options, removing deprecated options and simply making it just look better. Thanks jQuery UI!

Firebug Lite has been a very popular feature since we first announced it, which has led to a handful of bug fixes over the last month. The most major of these was that the initial Windmill implementation of Firebug Lite required you to have Internet access as it was using resources that were hosted elsewhere.

These have since been copied to our source tree and are made available by the Windmill server so you can happily introspect your Web Apps JavaScript while writing tests on your Intranet.

Output and Performance
Instead of writing all the raw windmill output to the output and performance tabs there is now an array called windmill.errorArr, where all terrible errors and warnings about technical details are pushed in the case you are interested to see all that data. However, it’s more likely that you aren’t and scrolling through all that output data becomes tedious.

This is why we have implemented output in blocks with the background color representing pass/failure with green/red (white for performance). These blocks are expandable, clicking them will reveal all output (or performance information) we know about the action that was executed. This should give you a faster general overview of your results and allow you to quickly see the details you care about.

Other Worthwhile Mentions
We moved our XPath implementation from Ajax-Slt to JS-XPath, which has proven to be more accurate when it comes to resolving XPath generated in Firefox (or using Firebug) against non XPath native browsers such as IE.

Many bugs and improvements have been made to the DOM Explorer, which should now feel a lot more like the Firebug DOM inspector, but should work in any browser.

We have also put a lot of effort into improving the communication between the JavaScript Controller and the Python Service so that when a test fails you get as much detailed information in the service as you do in the IDE.

Timing and MozMill
The timing has lined up nicely as we are working on both a 1.0 release for Windmill and MozMill. MozMill is geared towards automated testing of all applications on the Mozilla Platform and functions in the trusted space providing lots of very useful flexibility.

You can currently try out MozMill 1.0rc1 as a Firefox Add-on, and keep your eyes pealed as some exciting new MozMill feature work is around the corner.

Participate
We are always trying to make life easier for the test writer, so please log your bugs and feel free to come chat with us in #windmill on FreeNode.

I am currently up here in Whistler BC for the Mozilla Summit. There is about 400 people here staying at the Westin Resort & Spa up here in scenic Canada. 

The schedule for the con can be found here; http://wiki.mozilla.org/Summit2008/Sessions/Schedule

I do have to say that Mozilla is doing a great job at taking care of all their contributors and employees this week, and I feel like a lot of progress is being made on many levels. It’s very useful to see details as to how people are going about this, but it’s even more useful to see things on a bit higher level. It can be easy to get lost in the forest of Open Source, especially the way that Mozilla builds on things organically. 

The sessions are ranging from “The History of the Browser” to Mobile, QA, UE/UI, Thunderbird, planning etc. As Moz has people all over the world I am getting to hear some very interesting accents and interpretations of things. At the dinner last night I was sitting across from people from Germany, Macedonia and Israel. Amazing how the Moz projects can cross the globe and still keep communication open with each of it’s appendages. The keynote from Mitchell Baker and John Lilly gave me a very solid impression of what they feel the company values, where it should be going and most importantly their extreme satisfaction with where it currently is.

Tomorrow I will be doing a session with Mikeal Rogers and Clint Talbert to demo and explain the GristMill XUL testing framework. My piece of this project is called Mozmill, which started out as a straight across port of the Windmill source with the addition of XUL support and has turned into a much more advanced tool that will fill some needs that have existed for a very long time.

I found it interesting to find out that the VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer announced his departure last week during Oscon. Their have been mixed reactions about this, but many speculations were proven correct today when he announced he was going to facebook, http://blog.mozilla.com/schrep/. The idea of an IPO is can be extremely appealing, apparently they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

This morning we were alerted that tons, literally tons of rock had fallen on the highway 99 which turns out is the most convenient of two possible road trips to get back to Vancouver. We are leaving Friday morning, and the new word is that we will all be loaded onto shuttles to embark on the 7 hour trip back to the airport. This will make for an extremely long day and I am not looking forward to it, but the trip was well worth it and I look forward to getting home and picking up where I left off at Slide.