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If it were a windows program, I would use Auto it to automate testing. Is there something similar for browser-based apps?
Nothing too complex, it should just allow scripting (preferable for me to macro-recording) to simulate human interaction with the browser, which means being able to identify fields of a form by name, inject text into some, simulate mouse-click on others, etc and then, after submitting a form, should be able to read text certain named controls, check the status of others (checked, radio group index, read-only, etc).
While I do appreciate a full featured product, I don't appreciate a steep learning curve. so something as simple as the scripting of Auto It woudl be fine.
I don't know if it makes a difference which browser is used, but I could live with MSIE 6 or higher (maybe 7 or higher at a push).
Edit: Three posters so far (out of three) recommend Selenium. One says it is FireFox only and I need to test MSIE, however some quick googling shows that this should be possible (although you might have to set everything up in FF first, then switch over to MSIE).
See http://www.emadibrahim.com/2009/01/19/testing-web-app-with-selenium-explorer-and-net/ and http://wiki.openqa.org/display/SEL/Selenium+Core+FAQ Hope this helps someone.
You have several options to choose from:
Selenium
Watin/Watir
HtmlUnit
Sahi is another option. (We user sahi and selenuim)
Selenium would an the ideal tool for this.
I'd recommend Selenium, though it's for Firefox.
Try out Celerity. It renders javascript and works without a browser
Selenium is widely used, mostly because of their recorder (which is supported only in FF, but you can then replay the tests hitting IE). Its language is commonly referred as "Selenesse".
It's also a great choice if you expect to do some performance testing in a grid... but it seems this is not your case.
However, I would recommend not to use Salenium/Selenesse; instead, look for Selenium + Webdriver (Selenium 2), which is still in beta. The language construct are much better (but you don't have a recorder).
Other good option is Sahi. I found its API to be easier, in the sense that Sahi's code tries to deal itself with the problem of finding the button/link/etc you want him to click. For example, instead of relying in complex XPath expressions, you can say something like "click the link tag nearest to the div with attribute id="menu" (you can do this with one line of code). It has also a recorder.
I want to recommend something I found last week and definitely think that this is interesting.
QA Agent (http://qaagent.com)
It allows you to create web automated test in your browser. I really liked that it is free and you don't need to install anything. It looks like this is a new initiative so there are a lot of improvements which can be done.
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I would like a general purpose code snippets library, that I could use to store bits of code for any language, organized in folders. When any developer on the network adds a snippet, it should get transferred to others.
How can I do this simply? Any app that could be used for sharing libraries of text should be okay too.
That's called "a wiki".
We use a Sharepoint Wiki page for exactly this purpose ... that way code instructions and examples can be included in the same place.
A wiki is definitely the way to go but why stop there? Why not go with an issue tracking system that adds wiki functionality?
I have first hand experience with Trac and Redmine and openly recommend both of them. We've recently switched from Trac to Redmine where I work and I think I like it a little more than Trac, and use the wiki functionality almost everyday.
Update:
If you are looking for something smaller scale, there was a previous discussion here on SO that looks like it has some interesting links.
You might be interested in snip2code.
They do exactly what you are talking about... searching, collecting and sharing snippets of any language. It solves the problems I had for similar issue.
Hope it may help
Code Warehouse is the most extensive source code snippets manager. Code Warehouse is multi-user ready, which means that an organization’s entire development team can share a central code library and benefit from code that is already written and tested.
alt text http://www.xcca.com/cwbig.png
Please have a look at gist.github.com. This is definitely much better than a wiki sharepoint.
Plus you can reuse snippets from other user.
Wiki were designed to share any type of content. Some tools have been specifically designed to share code snippets. Some IDEs also have snippet features.
A wiki is definitely not the best match because it will not integrate with your IDE requiring you to have a separate tool open.
I'm going back and forth between a few Mac applications (haven't decided on one yet but I have tried quite a few). Most of these options allow you to host your snippet library on Dropbox or another network storage location so you can share your library with others. I don't know of any that provide any sort of live changes monitoring though.
Text Expander
Though not designed as an actual code snippet application, I used this for that purpose for a while and was quite content with it. You can share your library with others whether they're on Mac or Windows because there is a compatible alternative for Windows (i forget the name of the Windows alternative but it's easily found on Google I'm sure)
Finally decided to move on because I just wanted something a bit more robust. But may be an option to consider for some.
Codebox
Dash
I just learned about this one and actually only just started trying it. So far it's pretty good and I haven't decided whether or not I'll stick to this or go back to Codebox. I really like the documentation library functionality it has but as far as storing snippets, with my limited experience thus far, all I can say, is I'm rather disappointed in the codehighlighting. It also doesn't have additional fields to write comments like some of the other applications do so your comments have to actually be written with the code. I can't say that bothers me though, it's actually a good thing.
Snippets
I was using this one for a while and liked it quite a lot but wanted something that I could not only store small snippets in but also full source files like a few self contained javascript libraries. I attempted to store a large javascript file and the program not only couldn't handle it, but it actually corrupted my entire snippet library which I was hosting on Dropbox. Not sure if it was a self contained problem because I immediately uninstalled the app after that. But overlooking that i
A few others I may try but have no opinion about thus far
Code Bank (open-source)
Code Collector Pro
Last but not least.. I've actually just been using Gist more and more lately. I'm not aware of any desktop application for Gist (there's a browser app for Chrome I think and a couple of third party applications on the AppStore but I haven't tried them)
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I often have to work with fragile legacy websites that break in unexpected ways when logic or configuration are updated.
I don't have the time or knowledge of the system needed to create a Selenium script. Besides, I don't want to check a specific use case - I want to verify every link and page on the site.
I would like to create an automated system test that will spider through a site and check for broken links and crashes. Ideally, there would be a tool that I could use to achieve this. It should have as many as possible of the following features, in descending order of priority:
Triggered via script
Does not require human interaction
Follows all links including anchor tags and links to CSS and js files
Produces a log of all found 404s, 500s etc.
Can be deployed locally to check sites on intranets
Supports cookie/form-based authentication
Free/Open source
There are many partial solutions out there, like FitNesse, Firefox's LinkChecker and the W3C link checker, but none of them do everything I need.
I would like to use this test with projects using a range of technologies and platforms, so the more portable the solution the better.
I realise this is no substitute for proper system testing, but it would be very useful if I had a convenient and automatable way of verifying that no part of the site was obviously broken.
We use and really like Linkchecker:
http://wummel.github.io/linkchecker/
It's open-source, Python, command-line, internally deployable, and outputs to a variety of formats. The developer has been very helpful when we've contacted him with issues.
We have a Ruby script that queries our database of internal websites, kicks off LinkChecker with appropriate parameters for each site, and parses the XML that LinkChecker gives us to create a custom error report for each site in our CMS.
I use Xenu's Link Sleuth for this sort of thing. Quickly check for no deadlinks etc. on a/any site. Just point it at any URI and it'll spider all links on that site.
Desription from site:
Xenu's Link Sleuth (TM) checks Web
sites for broken links. Link
verification is done on "normal"
links, images, frames, plug-ins,
backgrounds, local image maps, style
sheets, scripts and java applets. It
displays a continously updated list of
URLs which you can sort by different
criteria. A report can be produced at
any time.
It meets all you're requirements apart from being scriptable as it's a windows app that requires manually starting.
What part of your list does the W3C link checker not meet? That would be the one I would use.
Alternatively, twill (python-based) is an interesting little language for this kind of thing. It has a link checker module but I don't think it works recursively, so that's not so good for spidering. But you could modify it if you're comfortable with that. And I could be wrong, there might be a recursive option. Worth checking out, anyway.
You might want to try using wget for this. It can spider a site including the "page requisites" (i.e. files) and can be configured to log errors. I don't know if it will have enough information for you but it's Free and available on Windows (cygwin) as well as unix.
InSite is a commercial program that seems to do what you want (haven't used it).
If I was in your shoes, I'd probably write this sort of spider myself...
I'm not sure that it supports form authentication but it will handle cookies if you can get it going on the site and otherwise I think Checkbot will do everything on your list. I've used as a step in build process before to check that nothing broken on a site. There's an example output on the website.
I have always liked linklint for checking links on a site. However, I don't think it meets all your criteria, particularly the aspects that may be JavaScript dependent. I also think it will miss the images called from inside CSS.
But for spidering all anchors, it works great.
Try SortSite. It's not free, but seems to do everything you need and more.
Alternatively, PowerMapper from the same company has a similar-but-different approach. The latter will give you less information about detailed optimisation of your pages, but will still identify any broken links, etc.
Disclaimer: I have a financial interest in the company that makes these products.
Try http://www.thelinkchecker.com it is an online application that checks number of outgoing links, page rank , anchor, number of outgoing links. I think this is the solution you need.
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We are looking for an ASP.NET compatible data grid that allows for multi-line editing similar to Excel or a WinForms data grid. It must also support very basic keyboard input (tab, arrow keys, return). Note that we are not looking for Excel capabilities (functions, formatting, formulas) ... just a grid for fast data entry.
I've looked at Telerik, Infragistics, ComponentOne, DevExpress, and many others ... all their support teams have said that the controls either do not support multi-line, or do so in such a clunky way that it would be unusable.
Has anyone used any Excel-like grids that they can recommend? The client-side grids seemed closer to what we needed, with Sigma Widgets ( example ) being the closest I've found so far. Extjs's grid was too inflexible, and the jQuery grid was too buggy.
It does not exist today. There are products such as those you have mentioned which have tried, but in my experience none of them will make an experienced Excel user happy.
My company makes Excel compatible spreadsheet components for use with Windows Forms and ASP.NET. We have been getting this question for years, so we have of course considered building one because it looks like a good business. But HTML / JavaScript is just not a suitable platform for building something which "feels right" to users who want it to work like Excel - IMO.
We have settled on the idea of building a spreadsheet control for Silverlight. I believe this will give you the best of both worlds - cross platform rich interactive spreadsheet in the browser which any Excel user would be comfortable with. Unfortunately, that is not going to happen this month or next...
At my previous company, we actually built a spreadsheet component as a Netscape Plugin, as an ActiveX control and as a Java Applet. They had a little bit of success, but none of these technologies ever became ubiquitous in the enterprise for various reasons. I believe Microsoft is finally getting it right with Silverlight and that Silverlight will become the gold standard for browser based Line of Business applications in the Enterprise.
EDIT:
I should have mentioned that the product I alluded to above is Formula One / NET (Netscape Plugin released ~1995), Formula One / ActiveX and Formula One for Java - which is now sold by Actuate as e.Spreadsheet. I left in 2002, but AFAIK they still maintain the Java Applet which is probably the best example of an Excel like UI in the browser (I have no interest in the product any more - in fact we compete to some extent with e.Spreadsheet and intend to have a better answer with a Silverlight control in the future). I did not mention it by name in my original answer because it is a Java product - not a .NET product - but it is a potential answer even for an ASP.NET web site.
Lloyd Cotten correctly comments that Google Docs is an example of a spreadsheet built with HTML / JavaScript. Lloyd says Google Docs "definitely 'feels right' in its similarity to Excel". While I respect Lloyd's opinion, in my experience Google Docs does not 'feel right'. Perhaps this is because I'm a spreadsheet guy. I do know that we talk to potential customers almost every day who are trying to solve the problem of the OP, and they have all looked and cannot find one they are happy with - but of course they would not be calling us if they had so we are dealing with a biased sample and I understand that.
So I just want to clarify that there are in fact plenty of examples of HTML / JavaScript grids and spreadsheets which are usable. It's just that I don't want to have to use them because I expect certain keys to do certain things and a particular level of responsiveness which is just not there today with any of the HTML / JavaScript solutions I have tried (and I look at them regularly because my company could definitely sell such a product if it were feasible to build one that we could be proud of).
How about FarPoint Spread?
I'm in the middle on evaluating FarPoint Spread for ASP.NET, and so far I've been happy with the result.
We ended up using Sigma Grid ... thanks for all the other replies!
Well.. not sure, but I am looking for something similar and I found:
Nitobi
Not sure if it does exactly what you want, although youcan definately move around with cursor keys, and edit inline....
EDIT
Also Essential Objects have a good editor too... seems very like excel...
http://demo.essentialobjects.com/Default.aspx?path=Grid_i1_i20
RealWorld Grid is probably what you are looking for. I'm using it in my projects, and it works perfectly.
Here's their CooglePlex page
I don't think it supports the arrow keys, but it makes multirow editing a breeze.
p.s. seems like you're looking for client-side grids ... this one is server-side. I'll leave the comment there, somebody might find it useful.
I have used the Infragistics grid with success. However, the learning curve is huge (and there's practically no support) and I don't know if there is multi-line editing.
I've used Syncfusion's components and they're quite good, they boast an "Excel-like" editor, though I didn't see multi-line mentioned.
For intranet and IE users Office Web components can be an option. While flying in the face of all things a good web application should be, they let users feel at home in office on the web.
I had great success using the pivot table control combined with MS OLAP a few years ago. User loved it and no wheels needed to be reinvented.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=982B0359-0A86-4FB2-A7EE-5F3A499515DD&displaylang=EN
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164070.aspx
I think http://codethat.com/grid/ is quite good!
Excel Like GridView allows for multiline editing and navigating using the arrow keys, as well as resizing columns and rows.
http://darkroastjava.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/creating-an-excel-like-grid-for-asp-net/ is an extension of that which also supports pasting multi-cell values from the clipboard.
Unfortunately, both only work in IE so far, but that meets my personal needs at this point of time.
dhtmlxGrid (client-side, JavaScript grid) supports multiline feature (demo), keyboard navigation and comes with server-side connector for ASP.NET. In case, someone is still looking for such a grid. Disclosure: I'm a part of the DHTMLX team.
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I like the simplistic look and design of some of the Microsoft blogs. Alas, I can't join the Microsoft dev party and create my own development blog on the blogs.msdn.com page because I don't work at Microsoft, and I already have my own wordpress blog.
I was looking to have my blog styled to one of the default looking themes shown here: http://blogs.msdn.com/jmeier/default.aspx
Could Microsoft take legal action against me if I used a stylesheet from their page? If I made my page 'based' off their stylesheet, e.g. written from the ground up, would that be copyright infringement?
Could Microsoft take legal action against me if I used a stylesheet from their page?
Absolutely, since you infringed their copyright. On the other hand, it's debatable whether the stylesheet alone constitues a sufficient threshold of originality to justify legal actions1. At the least, taking without asking is often considered rude. ;-)
1) No. It certainly doesn't. A sophisticated design however will.
Yes, you can get in legal trouble for copying a site's stylesheet since it's typically a copyright violation. Worse, you could get publicly bashed on blogs like youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com, making such blog posts about you high-ranked Google results for your name, thus tarnishing your reputation irreversibly.
Don't do it, it's not worth the risks.
You could. You probably wont.
Most importantly: Why bother? CSS is pretty simple, it's essentially positioning a bunch of boxes around, and colouring them..
Just look at their CSS files and layout, and reimplement it yourself.. It'll probably end up easier than reworking their CSS to work with your site (unless you completely copy their site, including the CSS, HTML and layout images), plus you'll learn a lot about CSS while you do it.
AFAIK, and IANAL, and all those other useful acronyms....
Under UK law, I believe you can get away with this kind of thing as long as there are at least 6 demonstrable and obvious differences between the copied article and the copy. Since I'm not a lawyer, I'm not going to go into what constitutes a demonstrable and obvious difference, but I would imagine a colour change would count as one...
You would obviously have to check the laws of your region before taking this advice.
Of course you will, Microsoft China was in a similar situation back when their Juku Blogging Service was found out to be a rip-off of Plurk, and yes, line by line code copying.
Microsoft responded with: “Microsoft takes intellectual property seriously, and we are currently investigating these allegations. It may take some time due to the time zone differences with Beijing.” when they were asked about it.
Here's a link to that article I was referring to.
I think Microsoft uses one of the templates that come out of the box with community server. But even if they didn't, I haven't heard of a case of someone having a cease and desist based on leveraging someone else's css.
Technically, they could. It is a violation of their copyright. If they exercised this right, however, it would likely be a PR disaster.
I think you're probably safe if you use it.
This would be a horrible idea, but you couldn't get into any trouble if you simply linked to their css.
You could also link to a copy of their css that was located somewhere else that is not associated with your website ;o)
Just some thoughts ...
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We've used the no-longer-supported RichTextBox control as part of our (ASP.NET-based) CMS for a long time, and we'd like to replace it with something lighter-weight and with better cross-browser support. We were originally looking at various ASP.NET components, but I'm wondering if we'd be better off just using an open-source, all-Javascript solution instead.
I'm a recent convert to jQuery, and I've been amazed at what can be done purely on the client side with very compact add-ons like Flexigrid and of course the excellent WMD. I've done a little poking around for all-Javascript editors, and this is what I've found so far:
Batiste jQueryEditor
Xinha
YUI Rich Text Editor
Tiny MCE
FCKeditor
After a superficial review, Tiny MCE looks like a good choice; but I'd be interested in hearing from people in the SO community who have actually used these. Let me know what you think.
I've used TinyMCE. Great across browsers; easy to configure to be extremely light weight and allows you to control what your user can do. Some of the plug-ins (such as the image manager) are great and easy to implement. Nice that it also support the Google Spellchecker so you don't need any libraries installed on your server.
I've used TinyMCE and I must say I'm not a fan. The main issue with it is that when new versions are released, the API can change drastically, making it very difficult to manage upgrades. There seems to be little regard for backwards compatibility.
The YUI editor is quite nice, and really easy to use. It's still beta as far as I know, so I'm not sure I would necessarily recommend it in a production environment.
FCK is a nice editor, and it has ASP.NET support.
I've used FCKeditor, it's a good editor. Pretty easy to use. The newer versions have very good cross browser support.
It's been mentioned, but the memories of that year lost to RadEditor still haunts me.
On the bright side, they have an incredibly vigilant, and apparently numerous support-staff;
so whenever you need to find that little whatnot that's causing that particular day's RadBugs;
you know you can always have them brew up some custom and obscure mini-fix.
After one year of tangoing with that beast, I had to retreat to pastoral C64 GOTO adventures to preserve my sanity...
Alas, we all need our WYSIWYG editors from time to time, and after trying out both (F)CKeditor and TinyMCE in .NET settings, I am humbled by both.
Would choose TinyMCE at gunpoint though...
I was looking for a good editor too last week, tried WMD but is just not easily customized enough compared to markItUp. It's so easy to extend and customize markItUp, function-wise and theme-wise.
OpenWYSIWYG was on my list too but after trying markItUp I got stuck with it. Plus OpenWYSIWYG is not jQuery, it's JavaScript, but open-source and cross-browser.
WebKit.org has a demo of a very nice/subtle text editor, but i don't know if it works in IE at all (It does work in WebKit based browsers (obviously) and Firefox)
I can't tell if you're specifically looking for a free/open-source solution or not. Others have mentioned many great open-source editors.
If you're willing to look at commercial solutions, Telerik offers the RadEditor. It is highly integrated with ASP.NET and supports all the major browsers.
Event if you will have a lot of connection bandwidth and patience :)
Actually, Telerik is an ASP.NET product and it require asp.net ajax frameworks for runtime and it need to ajax scriptmananer on the running page.
In my opinion, Telerik not good example for this subject.
i'm currently looking for the same kind of editor - lightweight, jQuery and with ASP.Net support. i've came accross Batiste Bieler's jQuery Lightweight Rich Text Editor which seems very simple, nice, pure jQuery lightweight editor.
and there is interpid studios variation that states to be ASP.Net compatible and based on the original above mentioned library (although, doesn't explain what is the thing with being ASP.Net compatible and what doesn't make the original compatible with it too...)
i haven't tried any of those yet, but it seems that i will in the next several days, because i'm looking to replace FCK Editor because it has some quirks and strange behavior to my app users. so i might update this post with my own experience with this/these editor(s).
If someone tried those already, please comment to let others know what do you feel about this.