Selenium is a high quality open source test automation tool for web application testing. Selenium runs in Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh, Safari on the Mac, with plans to support Safari on iPhone soon. Selenium test scripts are portable, can be run from browsers (using Selenium IDE) or from JUNit or NGUnit (using Selenium RC) etc.. For example, test scripts written using Selenium IDE in Firefox on Windows can run on Firefox in Mac or Linux, without changing any code. Selenium tests run directly in browsers and so matches the end-user experience closely.

There are three variants of Selenium, which can be used in isolation or in combination to create complete automation test suite for your web applications.

• Selenium Core - In Selenium Core the tests scripts (written in HTML) and the Selenium Test Runner (written in Javascript) are uploaded to the same web server that hosts the application you are trying to test. It is a simpler form of Selenium, and suitable for non-developers, but it has some inherent limitations.


• Selenium IDE - Selenium IDE is a Firefox plugin, which includes the entire Selenium Core, allows you to record, play back, edit, and debug tests in browser. It provides the simplest introduction to Selenium and is highly recommended for beginners. You can save the tests / test suite created in xml or html format. However to run them in an automated fashion you need Selenium Remote Control which is described next.


• Selenium Remote Control - The Selenium Remote Control allows you to develop test cases and test suites in Java (supports JUnit & NGUnit), PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl and even .NET. It is the most flexible setup but requires some development knowledge to set up and use.


• Selenium Grid - Selenium Grid allows several Selenium Remote Control servers to be accessed in parallel by Selenium Grid server. This is extremely useful for automated load and stress testing of web applications.

Today we will discuss on how you can easily create automatic test scripts using Selenium IDE and convert them to JUnit tests (which uses Selenium Remote Control) which can be added to your JUnit based automatic regression test suite.
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WordPress, in recent versions, have forces the display of WordPress as the generator in meta tags along with the version information in the header of your WordPress blogs - <meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.5.1" />. Unlike previous versions there is not easy way to remove it. Unless WordPress is using that to provide support (which it doesn’t), I don’t see any good reason for providing that extra bit of help to hackers, do you? Here is a simple plugin which will remove the WordPress generator meta tag along with its version information.

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Newer versions of WordPress (2.3.1 and above) adds two extra lines to your blog header. They are:
<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://blog.taragana.com/xmlrpc.php?rsd" /><link rel="wlwmanifest" type="application/wlwmanifest+xml" href="http://blog.taragana.com/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml" />
You need them to use Windows Live Writer to write to your WordPress blog. However many, like me, do not use Windows Live Writer. For them such headers are simply junk and add to the size of their pages (and download time) without adding any value to them or to their users. For such bloggers (majority I presume) here is a simple WordPress plugin (Angsuman's Windows Live Manifest Remover WordPress plugin) which removes these two header links from your WordPress blog.

Download Angsuman's Windows Live Header Remover Plugin, rename the file to angsumans-windows-live-header-remover.php, upload it to wp-content/plugins folder of your blog and activate it from Plugin Management screen. It requires zero configuration. It does one thing and does it well - remove these two useless headers from your WordPress blog.

Technical Note: There is a similar WordPress plugin which does the same thing. This plugin works differently in that it doesn't add the code directly to the plugin body but to the 'init' hook. This ensures that this plugin will remain compatible with future versions of WordPress as it doesn't depend on the relative order of execution of the plugins versus the default WordPress filters. Sounds complicated? To put it simply - Install the plugin and then forget about it forever. It will continue to serve you (your blog) in the background for a very long time.

You can get more free WordPress plugins here.

Extendable (by plugins, …) Static Analysis tools like FindBugs can enhance the security of your Java applications (web as well as standalone or client-servers applications) in several significant ways.

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These add-ons are so useful that I cannot work for a single day without them and so I would suspect most web developers and QA Engineers. These plugins / add-ons makes Firefox a formidable web development and testing platform. They are:

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While running some Java applications (like Thinreader) you may see this strange looking error - Couldn’t find per display information. You may find this error when running such applications in JDK 6 or later. Let’s find out more about it and how you can easily fix it.

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Sun offers 5 free proficiency assessment examinations. Read below for details and how you can take them.
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To commemorate Sun’s awarding over half million certifications, Sun will allow you to re-take the exam one additional time, should you need it, for free if you place your order by June 20 2008. If you are not sure about your chances in the very first time, this is a golden opportunity for you. Here’s how you can avail this opportunity.

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The Java Composite Application Platform Suite is a collection of middleware software suites using service-oriented architecture for business integration (SOA/BI). Java CAPS is a standard based open source platform for developing software infrastructures using SOA. It is one of the first open-source SOA platforms which have been created using Open ESB (The Enterprise Service Bus) community.

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iPhone doesn’t natively support Java / J2ME. However as a J2ME developer there are two good ways to develop iPhone applications using Java / J2ME. Read below for details and also to know how you can upload, compile and run Java applications on iPhone.

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