A year after moving its SilkTest functional testing tools to Eclipse (the old UI is also still available), Borland is doing what it terms a “relaunch” of the product by rewriting its core record-and-playback agent. The result is that the new record/playback agent is more modular, enabling customers to extend it to their own custom objects.

 
A new Java-based SDK has been added to, not only enable Borland to support new technology object types, but also for customers to add their own. “With our old API, it took three to six months to port, whereas with the API, that goes down to a matter of weeks,” explained Borland’s Brad Johnson, senior product marketing director for Lifecycle Quality Management. When paired with the Eclipse interface, Johnson added, the Java SDK makes it easier for developers to generate their own functional regression test regimens and customize it for the technologies or objects that they work with.

Out of the box, Borland is adding support of Adobe’s Flex framework as the first new object type supported with the new record/playback agent technology. The choice of Adobe Flex was logical in that Adobe itself is a customer, and therefore, the Borland folks have a much deeper familiarity with Flex. And Adobe has a definable API – AMF3 – to make the job doable.

This is Borland’s first stab at supporting testing of Web 2.0,-style, Rich Internet Application (RIA) artifacts. Logically, Microsoft Silverlight is the next target, fort which SilkTest will likely add support in the next release, slated around year-end.

Beyond that, functional testing of Ajax opens up a Pandora’s Box, as obviously, it is a style of programming with huge variation in the way that JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest, and JSON are used, so developing formal support would likely be akin to tracking a moving target. Obviously, while the rich Internet apps share behavioral similarities with class client/server, the fact is that technology targets are far more elusive (few of the technologies are owned or governed by any specific entity) and the way the various JavaScript libraries and DHTML are used varies by developer.

In all likelihood, Borland will eventually support some frequent use cases that may or may not come out of efforts from the OpenAjax Alliance to harmonize the behavior of JavaScript objects. It may have to herd a bunch of cats to pull it off.

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