Bob's Blog

Just a quick note to let you know that Brian Swartzfager has added support for ColdFusion 7 and 8 to the CFSelenium project by adding a tag-based cfc. This is now included in the latest version (1.2), which can be downloaded from the CFSelenium RIAForge page.

Brian, who will be maintaining the tag-based version, has written up a blog post about this addition to the CFSelenium project.

Just a quick note to let you know that the Call for Pecha Kucha Speakers and BoF Survey for cf.Objective() are now open. The details can be found at the cf.Objective() web site.

I had previously been making announcements about cf.Objective() via my blog, but now that we have a news section available at the official site all announcements will be published there. If you're interested in keeping on top of cf.Objective() news I suggest you add the news page to your RSS readers.

You remember hanging out in your friend's basement? You'd go down there after school, and on the weekends, and you'd chill out and listen to tunes. You'd have your favourites that you'd listen to, but as often as not someone would pull out a new record for everyone to check out. Maybe it was something they'd just picked up at the local record store, or maybe something from their collection that hadn't seen the stylus in awhile. Everyone would sit back on the old sectional, the needle would hit the vinyl and you'd be transported somewhere else.

You'd close your eyes and listen as the sound waves did their thing to you. Sometimes they'd delight, sometimes they'd annoy, and every now and then they'd turn you onto a new band or disc that would stay with you for years to come. Often for the rest of your life.

I remember those days, and I'm going to do my part to bring a touch of that back. Join me on Monday, March 7th at 1:00pm Eastern time, on CodeBass Radio for the inaugural trip down those stairs and allow me to spin some tunes for you. Some may be familiar to you, a lot will not be. I hope that you'll enjoy them, and maybe discover some new stuff that you wouldn't have otherwise.

A big thanks goes out to Vicky Ryder for providing me with this opportunity. You can listen in at www.codebassradio.com or by using the awesomely cool MediaSlurp AIR app which comes bundled with a bunch of other great community streams and podcasts, including the brand-spanking new 2 devs from down under.

I hope to see you online on Monday afternoon.

I promised John Whish that we'd have another version of ValidateThis, an awesome validation framework for ColdFusion, out in time for his presentation at Scotch on the Rocks on March 4th, 2011, and I've never been one to disappoint. So today I announce the release of version 0.99 of ValidateThis.

The lion's share of the work on this release was done by John, Adam Drew and myself. A lot of the work in this release is actually building towards something very cool that will come out later in the year, but there are still some significant enhancements including:

• Goodies for ColdBoxers including a ColdBox interceptor and three new sample applications.
• New debugging features to make it easier to figure out what's going wrong when things aren't working as you expect.
• The ability to ignore a validation client-side.
• Support for onMissingMethod in your objects.
• JavaScript assets are now retrieved from a CDN or written to the browser so you don't need to place JS files in a web accessible folder.
• Updates to the addFailure() method.
• A couple of new validation types were added.

As always, the latest version can be downloaded from the ValidateThis RIAForge site. Details of the enhancements follow:

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Hot on the heels of the release of CFSelenium, I have created a Firefox plugin that will allow you to export scripts from Selenium-IDE in CFSelenium format, wrapped inside an MXUnit test case. The plugin is dead simple to use, simply add the extension to your installation of Firefox and you'll see a new menu item in Selenium-IDE under File - Export Test Case As..., Options - Format and Options - Clipboard Format. The menu item is labelled CFML (ColdFusion) Selenium RC (MXUnit). Choosing this menu item will translate your current test case into CFSelenium format, wrapped in an MXUnit test case.

The Firefox extension is available in the distribution at both GitHub and RIAForge, and will hopefully be made available at SeleniumHQ once it's found to be stable. I'm sure it could use some improvements, so please give it a try and let me know what you think of it.

I was able to create the Firefox extension by basically copying and modifying the source code for the Grails Formatters created by Rob Fletcher, so a big thank you goes out to him for making the job simple and painless.

We were very lucky to have Adam Goucher, a member of the core Selenium team and the maintainer of Selenium-IDE, as a speaker at the Toronto ColdFusion User Group this month. Adam delivered an awesome presentation about automated testing in general and Selenium in particular.

During the session I asked a bunch of questions about the architecture of the Selenium components, in particular Selenium-RC and WebDriver, which is now part of Selenium 2.0. Through our conversation I came to understand that it would be fairly simple to create a native ColdFusion client library for Selenium-RC, so I decided to give it a try. Thankfully it was as simple as I expected and I decided to complete the library so that the full API of Selenium-RC is supported.

Thus CFSelenium was born and was given a home at GitHub. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, fear not, I will provide some more background information on Selenium and Selenium-RC in the rest of this post.

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