dIon Gillard – Multitask Consulting

Automated Testing of Web Applications Using XML

Testing of web applications is often left to specialist testers using expensive tools. Much of what needs to be tested is simple, tedious and boringly repetitive, e.g. navigation, HTML compliance and authentication to name a few. Much of this testing is originally the responsibility of the developers of the web application, who have limited resources, and who tend to test "their changes" and not the entire application. One way of making testing easier is to automate the drudgery and make creating automated tests easier. Tools such as JUnit have been available for developers to unit test code.

Topics for this session include:

• What is a web application
• What should be tested
• Code based frameworks for Web Testing – HttpUnit, StrutsTestCase, Cactus
• XML based tools for Web Testing – Latka, XMLUnit, JXWeb
• Limitations of XML based testing
• "Automatically" gathering test cases
• Automating testing – Ant, CruiseControl
• Comparison with commercial tools

Attendees are expected to have a basic knowledge of web technologies and web application development.

Developing Portlets for WebSphere Portal Server

Portlets are Web components which are specifically designed to be aggregated into a page. Usually many Portlets are involved in the construction of a single Portal page. WebSphere's Portlet API defines the different components for Portal Computing, their interaction, lifecycle and semantics.

Topics for this session will include:

• What is a Portlet
• The Portlet API
• Portlet lifecycle
• Remote Portlet Execution
• Portlets as Web services
• Portlets
• Portlet Deployment descriptor
• Packaging Portlets as an Application

dIon Gillard is the Technical Director and a founding member of Multitask Consulting, an Australia J2EE specialist services company. He has developed for Java since the pre 1.0 releases, helping to provide a wide range of development and mentoring services in several countries across the Asia Pacific region. dIon was the Lead Architect for the Pizza Hut e-commerce site in Australia, and has worked extensively in the enterprise arena with both government and large business in leveraging J2EE technologies to bring business results. dIon has been involved in the Jakarta Project of the Apache Software Foundation for the past few years, and has most recently worked on the various Commons components found there. Email: dion@multitask.com.au

Back to ...

Paul Giangarra

On to ...

Harvey Gunther