Posts Tagged ‘testing’

MSIE browser testing

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Testing web applications with various versions of MSIE (Internet Explorer) often proves problematic as it’s generally not possible to have more than one version installed on a single Windows installation. There are various approaches, such as:

  • Having an entire test lab with different browser configurations.
  • More often, it’s also possible to run a set of virtual machines on a single desktop.
  • Another option is to find a package that ‘hacks’ around some of the Windows limitations and installs (at least partially) the browser rendering capabilities.

NOTE: the final method above has some quirks, but you can generally use it for preliminary testing by developers as it’s obviously easier to maintain.

Here are a few common packages that I’m aware of:

Happy testing!

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Posted in MSIE bugs, WebStandards, Work | No Comments »

Open Source Desktop Virtualization

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Through the years, I’ve had to develop, maintain and support software on a variety of systems. Unfortunately, it’s often impossible to maintain specific software versions or configurations installed on physical machines. In the realm of web development, this becomes increasingly complex because of the rapid release of multiple browser versions.

To aid in testing, I’ve found that it’s often best to run these configurations in Virtual Machines, I’ve used VirtualPC and VMWare in the past, but have recently become a fan of Sun’s OpenSource release of VirtualBox as it runs on a wide variety of host systems and supports most x86 based operating systems as clients.

Cheers

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Posted in WebStandards, Work | No Comments »

Java knowledge testing

Friday, May 30th, 2008

I’ve got my “Java Yellow Belt” :)

While this website does not give out official certifications, it’s a decent measure of individuals knowledge and provides a great way to test what you know (and may have forgotten over the years).

http://www.javablackbelt.com/

Cheers!

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Java Code Coverage

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

In my “day job” I do lot’s of code reviews. I’m a big fan of Agile Programming and JUnits, recently I was introduced to the world of code coverage tools available (for free!) to Java developers.

IMHO, here’s the three front-runners.

Personally I prefer the Eclipse integration provided by ECLEMMA, but I agree that no one tool is ever ‘best’ for all scenarios.

Some background on this topic if you are interested in learning more:

Happy coding.

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Posted in Work | No Comments »