Parasol

Parasol (full name “Beach Parasol”) is a Smalltalk framework to automate web browsers. It’s particularly useful to write automated tests for Seaside web applications. Its design and implementation are based on the Java Selenium WebDriver API.

Example

Here’s a straightforward annotated example. This example uses Parasol to automate a search for “Pharo” on Wikipedia:

"Open a web browser on the English-language Wikipedia home page."
driver := BPRemoteWebDriver withCapabilities: BPDesiredCapabilities chrome.
driver get: 'http://en.wikipedia.org/'.

"Click on the search box and type in 'Pharo' followed by a press of the Return key."
(driver findElementByID: 'searchInput') click.
driver getKeyboard sendKeys: ('Pharo' , (String with: BPKeys return)).

"Get the text of the article's first paragraph and show it on the transcript."
Transcript show: ((driver findElementByID: 'mw-content-text') findElementByTagName: 'p') getText.

"Tell the browser to quit."
driver quit.

Check the Hands-On section below to learn how to run the example yourself.

Introduction Video

On YouTube you can find an introduction video about Beach Parasol. The video is a recording of a talk that was given at the ESUG 2013 conference. The slides of this talk are also available on SlideShare and as a PDF.

Hands-On

To try Beach Parasol, you'll need to get a few things:

A Pharo image
The Chrome web browser
The Selenium standalone server JAR file
The Chromedriver for your operating system

At the time of writing this README, we used Pharo version 5.0 #50766, Chrome version 55.0.2883.95, Selenium server v3.0.1 (“selenium-server-standalone-3.0.1.jar”) and Chromedriver v2.25. If you find things are not working with more recent versions, please do file an issue.

You should extract the Chromedriver's ZIP file into the directory where you put the Selenium server JAR file. To run the Selenium server, execute the following on the command line:

java -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver=chromedriver -jar selenium-server-standalone-3.0.1.jar

To load the Parasol package into the Pharo image:

Metacello new
    baseline: 'Parasol';
    repository: 'github://SeasideSt/Parasol/repository';
    load: 'tests'.
(Smalltalk at: #ZnZincServerAdaptor) startOn: 8080.

Now give the Wikipedia example from above a try! For more examples, check the test cases BPRemoteWebDriverTestCase and BPWebElementTestCase.

Documentation

If you need more documentation, you can check the documentation of Parasol’s Java counterpart. Most classes and methods in Parasol were designed to closely follow their Java counterpart, to make it easier to use its documentation and translate from Java-based examples. Good starting points are the documentation for the WebDriver and WebElement interfaces. They are the counterparts to BPRemoteWebDriver and BPWebElement.

The Seaside tutorial offered by the HPI Software Architecture Group has a chapter on “Testing Seaside Applications” using Parasol.

Supported Smalltalk Platforms

The main Smalltalk platform for Parasol is Pharo. Other supported Smalltalk platforms are GemStone and Squeak. There was support for VisualWorks in the past, but this has been removed due to lack of maintenance (see issue #8, let us know if you’re interested in VisualWorks support).

GitHub versus SS3 Repository

An older repository for Parasol exists on SqueakSource3. This GitHub repository is the current development repository, the older SqueakSource3 repository is no longer kept up-to-date.

Build Status

Parasol’s self-tests are automatically ran on Travis CI, the image above shows the status of the latest build of the “master” branch. Please note there's an open issue regarding some of the self-tests failing randomly (issue #2).

wvzuilen / Parasol