A lot of people know that I’ve been working with Selenium to automate UI tests. You can now see a few examples of how specifically we use Selenium at Google, via the publicly released Selenium-based tests used as part of the Maps API testing process.

When you’re developing a Web-based application, testing a Web UI can get quite time-consuming. Throw in the problem of having to support multiple browsers, and the complexity of AJAX, and things can get out of hand quite quickly. This is where having an automated set of UI tests can be a life-saver. Make these tests part of your CI process, and you’ll get feedback as soon as something is broken.

Often, people end up testing the UI as part of an end-to-end test. This isn’t necessarily the best way to be testing the UI, as you’re no longer able to pinpoint the location of problems to a particular layer. Is that problem you’re seeing a data-encoding issue of the HTTP request/response, the database, or the persistence API? It could be anywhere. So take advantage of that multi-tiered system design which you have. Test each layer in isolation, separate it from the other layers that it’s talking to by putting fake, mock or stub layers in place, and test that layer by pumping in events and calling methods. Check the calls appearing out of that layer to verify they’re what you expect, and you have a much more useful set of tests.

We’d already been advised to make sure to dress appropriately (in a suit), and been constantly reminded to bring our wallets. Here’s a picture documentary of what awaited us. In short, there was no more free food or drink, the pinball machines require you to put coins in (*gasp!*), and the Wii and XBox have disappeared. I think my favourite prank was the message on the printers:

The money collected today is being donated to charity.

Here’s a group shot of all those who participated:

The Google public April Fools jokes so far include Google Australia introduucing Google gDay, Gmail adding Custom Time, and Virgin and Google cooperating for Virgle. In other news, Google China’s Search is now powered by real humans and the YouTube homepage has been rickrolled (click on any featured video)! Google Book search introduces - scratch and sniff, and Google Calendar has the Wake Up Kit!

After my last two posts on the Sinhala iGoogle keyboard gadget and searching for Sinhala Unicode, I had a few questions on what Sinhala Unicode would look like, seeing that one needs to have a Sinhala Unicode font installed for it to render properly.

Each operating system seems to need a different number of steps to enable proper rendering.

• Windows XP: you need to install the Sinhala for Internet Explorer 6 patch to get IE working correctly. If you’re using Firefox, you should install the Firefox version supporting complex layout and right-to-left capability, to be able to view Sinhala correctly.
  Screenshot: Firefox on XP (broken)
  Screenshot: IE6.0 in XP (broken)
  Screenshot: IE6.0 in XP with Sinhala Patch (working)
• Windows Vista: this should work out of the box.
  Screenshot: Firefox on Vista (working)
  Screenshot: IE7.0 in Vista (working)
• Linux: follow these instructions to enable correct rendering in Firefox. Konqueror seems to get slightly confused, rendering some of the text correctly, but having problems with certain fonts.

Here’s the way my name should look:

And here’s my name, as rendered incorrectly in most configurations:

Both LKLUG and Akshar Unicode have problems rendering the text, even in configurations where other fonts are able to do so fine.

Akshar Unicode

This font looks the most broken

DinaminaUniWeb

This has a rustic, old-fashioned feel to it.

KandyUnicode

This font might have been alright had it not been that heavy.

KaputaUnicode

Kaputa is a very clean, clear font without any unnecessary embelishments.

LKLUG

LKLUG is slightly broken, and has issues rendering some combinations. It also has a slightly old-fashioned feel to it.

Malithi Web

Clean, and easy to read.

Potha

Potha is a very nice font, getting the strokes just right, looking elegant, modern and uncluttered.

Iskoola Potha

So it comes as no surprise that Potha seems to have been cleaned up and included in Windows Vista by default, named Iskoola Potha. This font has the honour of being the best-looking Sinhalese Unicode font.

Sarasavi Unicode

Sarasavi came in as the second best Sinhalese font. The strokes on this font were a bit too heavy, making it more difficult to read, with some of the strokes being exaggerated.

Here’s a test to see what happens when you search for රොෂාන් (Roshan) and සෙම්බකුට්ටිආරච්චි (Sembacuttiaratchy) via Google Sri Lanka. Actually, that last search should eventually be a GoogleWhack. If you use Firefox, the pages might not render correctly. Make sure you have a font like Kaputa Unicode installed. If you use any flavour of Linux, you’ll have to follow the instructions from here to enable proper support and rendering.

WebsiteOptimization.com provides a service to analyze webpages to determine their page-load speed, and suggesting ways to improve it. A useful tool for those developing web-sites.

MovableType 3.0 has changed it’s licensing, so it’s time to start looking at alternatives. WordPress seems to be the next logical choice. Even found a guide on migrating from MovableType to WordPress, where I’ll probably be spending quite some time.

And here we were, thinking that the browser wars had come to an end, after Internet Explorer crushed Netscape. Looks like Netscape’s offspring, Mozilla, is here to kick some IE ass, Read on here for information about how Mozilla and its derivatives are fighting back.

Time to start making these links available properly.

First of all, there’s the IE7 CSS file, which makes IE 5.5 and IE 6.0 finally render most CSS properly (including PNG transparency!).

On the other side, there’s two nice drop-down menu scripts which I’ve found:

• ADxMenu, which renders an appropriately marked up list into proper drop-down menus with sub-menus, and
• ypSlideOutMenus, which has a really sleek slide out effect.

Should merge these two at some point.

It seems IE’s implementation of the min- and max- width and height values is broken (surprise, surprise!). BUT - there’s a script available here, which will transparently make them functional.