April 2011 Summaries

The process of serving PHP/Pear packages with GitHub is made easy thanks to Pirum and Fabien Potencier. To create a pear channel on GitHub, one needs to install Pear and Git if not already done, then create a new repository and initialize it, add the origin remote, install Pirum, create a pirum configuration file, build the server, commit everything, rename the master branch to gh-pages, push it to GitHub, and wait for 15 minutes. Once the channel is available, one can test it by downloading packages from it using `pear channel-discover` and `pear channel-info`. To distribute PHP packages through a pear channel, one needs to create a package.xml file with metadata, validate the package, make it, add it to the channel locally, upload the changes to GitHub, and push them to gh-pages. With these steps, one can easily serve their own PHP/Pear packages with GitHub.

The web application testing company Sauce Labs has achieved a significant milestone by exceeding five million completed Selenium tests in its cloud-based Sauce OnDemand service. This milestone demonstrates the ease-of-use and value of the service, which enables QA and development teams to test web application functionality across all popular browsers without maintaining complex testing infrastructure. The success of Sauce Labs' service can be attributed to its combination of cloud computing and deep Selenium expertise, as well as its open-source contributions to the Selenium community, including the release of Se Builder and OnDemand support for Selenium 2. These advancements have made automated testing with Selenium more accessible and scalable for QA and development teams, driving demand for cross-browser testing services like Sauce Labs' OnDemand service.

Selenium is prone to "racing" its browser, which can lead to tests failing due to the browser's faster execution speed. This happens because Selenium interacts with a page at the speed of code, before it's fully loaded by the user. To fix this, Selenium should repeat its actions and assertions until they work. The issue arises from websites being designed for users' slower speeds, and web pages using JavaScript to load content after initial appearance. Selenium can't wait for these additional loads, leading to tests failing. To solve this, developers use spin asserts, which retry a test function over and over until it works, effectively making Selenium "lose the race" by waiting for the correct page loading conditions.