I've picked up a legacy application developed in C/C++ on Linux, using ncurses for UI. What automated testing tools are there for this environment?
Edit: I've used AutomatedQA TestComplete in the past, and this is the type of tool I'm looking for - except running on Linux, and with the ability to test Text UI apps.
I wrote something like that before. Not much docs, but you can try the code. It's written in Python and runs on Linux.
You would basically need the ANSIterm filter, and the expect module. Then you compose them into a filter. You'll likely have to start the process with the proctools module. They are all designed to work together or separately (modular).
I have considered using Rational Function Tester and TestComplete.
RFT has explicit support for testing this type of application (text-mode linux) via built-in terminal emulation.
TestComplete does not support testing Linux apps directly, but can be made to work by "testing" a COM-enabled terminal emulation program (Attachmate Reflection at this stage), and using COM from the test scripts to do screen scraping.
Have also considered using Reflection as the terminal emulator and rolling my own test framework in C# and NUnit.
Edit: "Final" solution is using Terminator (a Java terminal emulator), extending it with an RMI interface and using TestNG...
The expect tool sounds like what you need: http://linux.die.net/man/1/expect
Have a look at the free version of TETware from the Open Group. It is a full test harness based on TCL.
Related
After a lot of searching I have yet to find a way to sign a BlackBerry application on a Linux distribution with no GUI.
As of right now I'm getting the error "Unable to request signatures until this application has completed the initial key generation.". The problem is I'm not able to register the CSI files it seems via CLI. Has anyone accomplished this without setting up X11?
Yes, its definitely possible to do this on a headless Linux box. Heck, I do it on a headless Solaris/UltraSPARC server :-)
For actually running the tool, I like http://bb-ant-tools.sf.net/ . If you are using an older version of the signature tool, you may need to make some modifications as described on http://slashdev.ca/ .
While the tool is fully controllable from command-line parameters, it does unfortunately still require access to a running X server to function. The workaround for this is to install "Xvfb" (a fake X server for purposes like this), launch it in the background on your system, then set the DISPLAY variable so the signature tool will use it for its non-interactive GUI.
Blackberry sigtool may not be supported in Linux and it may be only partially working. BB dev tools are still Windows-centric.
How you manage/organize your collection of code snippets on Linux? Is there a specialized tool to do that (both in GUI and CLI environment)? Is there any convention about code snippet management in Linux? Also, I often do some work via ssh so it would be really helpful if I can access my snippet easily from command line. I just moved to Linux for several months and still got to learn a lot about software development in Linux.
Any suggestion is appreciated.
Thanks!
I think this is what you are looking for: Snippely and jCodeCollector
I use Snippely on my mac, it awesome.
Update: Moved to Dash for mac: http://kapeli.com/dash
You could use Code Barrel to do that. For GUI based you could use the webapp but for CLI you could write scripts using the API. There is a plugin for Eclipse based IDEs as well.
Are there any auto compiling scripts like the ones used at ideone.com and codepad.org available?
(preferably open source, and which execute the code in a safe environment.)
I don't think that they have special "autocompiling scripts". They could just be using normal compilers under a virtual machine for safety.
Or they could have developed something custom (Like Google app engine)
Update:
Apparently they are using normal compiler packages by Gentoo.
Why not to use Ideone API?
Are there any libraries for connecting as a client via Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in Linux? The language used is secondary to the issue of existence. Any mainstream language would do (e.g. C++, Perl, Java, Ruby, PHP, Python), and even less popular ones like OCaml or Scheme.
Is there any option available other than taking the rdesktop source and hacking a library out of that?
There is a set of cross-platform open source RDP libraries available in FreeRDP project. They are written in C and under Apache Licence 2.0. See http://www.freerdp.com
Typing rdp into my Mandriva Software Managment tool revealed libxrdp which is a library that xrdp depends on but I don't know the details so it may not be what you want.
The project website is xrdp.sourceforge.net.
You can look at these implementations:
FreeRDP (Apache License) - mostly C.
FreeRDP C# bindings
FreeRDP-WebConnect for HTML5 stuff
rdesktop (GPLv2) - mostly C.
rdpy (GPLv3) - python but bitmap stuff is written in C (borrowing code from rdesktop)
properJavaRDP (GPL) - java
Non portable implementations:
Terminals (MS-CL) - visual studio project.
And the reference documents:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc240445.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc240452.aspx (message flows / connection sequence)
rdesktop is going to be your best option. The code is quite clean and I don't think making a library would be a huge deal.
Another option if you prefer Java is the ProperJavaRDP Client http://properjavardp.sourceforge.net/ . It's nearly a strait port of rdesktop.
Sorry, but a quick strace and nm of rdesktop reveal nothing beyond X, crypto, and compression libs.
rdesktop does allow embedding into other windows, how does it not serve your purpose?
See the -X option in help
You could embed rdesktop in a window of your own per J-16 SDIZ's suggestion and then send X.org events to that window programmatically. A similar route would be to install a VNC server on the Windows machine and run a VNC client on the Linux machine. That way you can also programmatically send X.org events to the VNC client.
This is what browsershots.org uses to programmatically control various web browsers in a cross-platform way through Python. Have a look at the gui directory if the browsershots.org client source code
I've gotten xrdp to work with RHEL on EC2: xrdp.org
Is there any UI library that can be to build both a text user interface (ncurses) and graphical user interface (GTK? QT?) from the same source?
I know that debconf can be used with various frontends, I would like to build something similar but programmable.
The library that powers YaST independence to do ncurses, gtk and qt with one codebase provides what you are looking for, and it is not tied to YaST itself.
Actually libyui only requires the standard C++ library and phtreads (IIRC). The UI plugins require of course the respective libraries (Qt, ncurses). YaST uses libyui via a set of YCP bindings that export a YCP like API on top of libyui.
The library is a bit lowlevel (one layer below an event loop), my colleage Klaus Kämpf wrote about using it some time ago in his blog, including binding to scripting languages it using swig.
The only part that is SUSE specific is the packaging, so you would need to package it yourself. Stackoverflow did not allow me to link more than once. The code of the library is linked from Klaus blog. Replace libyui for "qt" and "ncurses" for the plugin's code.
Also google for "YaST Independence From YCP" to find a blog entry from Andreas Jäger on the subject.
you could write your program to uses ncurses, and then use PDCurses to convert it to an X11 application - as the readme advertise.
I know it because I've used it as portable curses, though I've never tested its X11 capabilities
Not exactly a library but you could consider writing a web app that degrades well to Lynx
The GoboLinux guys have created their own toolkit for python called AbsTK, they use it for their installer, which actually works really good. I have never used the toolkit myself, but the apps built with it seems solid.
There's Cursed GTK, but it seems a bit dated. I found some references to a port of Qt to ncurses called Qt Console, but it seems to have disappeared.
By using a library that targets both the text-mode and GUI environments, you have a big risk of getting stuck with the worst of both worlds.
You will be better off structuring your code using the MVC pattern, and providing separate views and controllers for each platform you target. Pushing all the logic down to the model classes has several other benefits:
The code will be easier to test because you are forced to keep the user interface out of the actual domain logic.
Your program can have user interfaces that have very little in common, e.g. a web UI, or an UI driven by speech.
You can run the program easily with no UI at all (i.e. script it) by accessing the model classes directly in the same way that the controller classes do.
I think what's used for configuring the linux kernel when compiling is dialog/cdialog/xdialog. But it's been a while since I've compiled a kernel, so my memory may be off. The most promising link I can find is this one for Xdialog.
Maybe tcl/tk would provide what you want http://www.tcl.tk/
Here's the page on interfacing with curses. There is a claim there of integration with ncurses.
http://www2.tcl.tk/2372