Tellurium 0.4.0 is out today. This release includes a lot of new features and enhancements such as data driven testing, framework configuration, and JUnit 4 support.
Tellurium is built on top of Selenium and tries to solve the shortcomings for Selenium., i.e., XPath everywhere, not robust, "record and reply" style, difficult to refactor and maintain. Tellurium provides you a totally different way to write Selenium tests.
The following are the main features for Tellurium:
1) Tellurium is not a "record and reply" style testing framework, but UI module centric. That is to say, you should define your UI module first. Based on your Ui module, you can write as many tests as you like just like writing JUnit tests. Tellurium also make it possible for users to write Tellurium tests when they start coding.
2) Tellurium uses very expressive way to define Ui Modules and writes tests. For example, in Selenium, you have to write the following ugly expressions (take Google start page as an example):
selenium.type("//input[@title='Google Search']", input)
selenium.click(""//input[@name='btnG' and @type='submit']")
In Tellurium, you can first define the UI module as:
ui.Container(uid: "google_start_page", clocator: [tag: "td"], group: "true"){
InputBox(uid: "searchbox", clocator: [title: "Google Search"])
SubmitButton(uid: "googlesearch", clocator: [name: "btnG", value: "Google Search"])
}
Then in your tests, you simple use
type "google_start_page.searchbox", input
click "google_start_page.googlesearch"
3) Tellurium is compatible with Selenium's locators, you can still use XPath like "//input[@title='Google Search']" in your UI module, but Tellurium give you additional advantage to use "google_start_page.searchbox"style syntax to refer the UI object instead of putting the XPath expressions everywhere.
4) Tellurium recommends you use composite locator, i.e., use UI object attributes instead of XPath to define the UI. For example, in the above example, you specify an InputBox object with its attribute title to be "Google Search". Once you define UI attributes, Tellurium will automatically create the runtime XPath for you. In this way, the UI module matches better with your UI markup languages such as JSP and ASP.
5) Tellurium exploits the "Group Locating" concept to treat a group of Ui Object as a whole instead of individual ones, which is the case for Selenium. In the above example, by specifying the "group" attribute to be "true", Tellurium will try to locate the UI objects in the DOM using all information from the Container, InputBox, and SubmitButton. This can help us a lot to find the UI locators. For most case, the information inside the group of UI objects is enough to locate all of them. That is to say, your Ui module only depends on attributes inside of itself, not any UI outside. As a result, make it very robust.
6) Tellurium provides many predefined UI objects for you to use directly, such as Button, CheckBox, InputBox, Selector, TextBox, and Table. In the meanwhile, it also provides you the capability to write your own custom UI objects.
7) Tellurium supports Domain Specific Language (DSL) for Web testing and you can even write all your tests in pure DSL scripts.
8) Tellurium comes with the "Data Driven Testing" feature so that you can use an input file to drive your predefined tests. One such example file is listed as follows:
##Data for test "checkBookList"
##TEST | CATEGORY | SIZE
checkBookList|Fiction|8
checkBookList|Fiction|3
##Data for test "getGCHStatus"
##TEST | LABEL | Row Number | Column Number
getGCHStatus |Example project labels:| 3 | 6
getGCHStatus |Example project| 3 | 6
Where the TEST column defines your test name and the rest columns are either input data or expected results.
9) Tellurium provides detailed documents on how to use Tellurium including introduction, tutorials, user guide, and FAQs. We also use Tellurium project website as an example to demonstrate how to write real world Tellurium tests.
Tellurium project web site is at:
http://code.google.com/p/aost/
and the user group is at:
http://groups.google.com/group/tellurium-users
You are welcome to try out Tellurium and feel free to join our user group and provide us your valuable comments and suggestions.