FrogBlog

Today’s the third, and last, day of our stay at the Webinale Conference. Squish is still a rather new and unknown contender in the AJAX world but it turned out that this is not a disadvantage. In fact, the whole scene is moving so quickly that there’s always something new (sometimes useless and over-hyped, sometimes interesting) and something else is outdated.

One nice thing about this conference is that even though there are a few vendors of AJAX Toolkits here, and lots of talks about how to write proper web applications, nobody cares about testing those GUIs yet. We’re the only ones to tackle that topic and hence get a very good amount of attention here by the visitors. Reggie’s talk was also received very well and even though the conference is rather smallish (this is the first year it’s taking place), we managed to get hold of a good number of leads (which, by the way, are of rather high quality – most people here already thought about testing, tried other testing solutions, and are generally everything but new to the topic).
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In about 3 hours, Frerich and I will fly to Stuttgart for the Webinale 07 conference – a two-day German Ajax/Web 2.0 conference and exhibition.

We will man a booth there to show off Squish 3.2 (specifically the Web edition). Tomorrow (May 22nd) at 10:30 I will give a talk on automated Web/Ajax testing where I will talk about the experience we gained on this topic and what to look out for when automating Web tests.

So if you are at the Webinale, make sure to drop by our booth at least for an infameous gummy frog!

Today we finally switched to Subversion as our revision control system at work. After using CVS for about ten years, the list of things we didn’t like about it became long enough to justify switching to something different.

At first it wasn’t quite clear what that “something different” would be; many KDE people (mainly from the Linux camp) suggested to use Git but that’s a no-go for us (we need our revision control system to work on Windows as well), leaving aside that some people here would probably rather walk over broken glass than adjusting their work style.

Since we’ve been using Subversion for quite some time at KDE, and we know that it feels very much like CVS (minus the annoying things), it came as a natural choice. First attempts to convert our internal repository went very well, and now – with the switch being final – many scripts which were developed as little side projects to KDE, such as ‘svnlastchange’, become useful to us, too.

And I don’t have to do the mental switch between svn and cvs all the time when moving between the office and home.

The biggest advantage Subversion gave me so far is related to merging patches: I have different checkouts for different Squish branches (one for 3.2, one for HEAD^H^H^H^Htrunk, et cetera) and very often I’m committing something to one checkout and then want to merge the same patch to the other checkout. I wrote a little script for that called ‘ilc’ (for ‘integratelastchange’ ) which makes that very easy. With that script I can just do


$ cd ~/src/squish/trunk
// .. Hack away ..
$ svn ci foo
Sending foo
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 12000.
$ ilc 12000 ../32-branch


And that’s it. However, I’d like to get rid of the revision number argument so that when the script is invoked with just one argument, it will always integrate the revision which I just checked in. Unfortunately the different types of revisions (COMMITTED and BASE and PREV and whatnot) confuse me a bit, I couldn’t find the right one yet.

Maybe some reader knows how to do that?

Even if that can’t be solved, I can now hardly imagine how we managed to survive this long with CVS on KDE.

With our latest addition to our team (say hi to Rob!) we reached the space-limit of our current office. Actually considering that Harri and me are sitting together in the meeting/lunch room I’d rather say that we grew out of it already. At least nobody can waste time in meetings this way

So we looked for new offices and recently signed the contract. For the locals, it is in the “alten Gaswerk” which is a really nice area with a beautiful atmosphere. It’s a new building with no interior yet. So the land-lord is setting set up the offices, walls, floor, etc. according to our needs which is really nice.

We will move there later this summer so everybody will have enough space again. Let’s just hope we will stay there for more than a year this time

The last day of the AJAXWorld Conference and Expo is about to end. Attendees are having their last break with some drinks and cookies before Session 10 and 11 from Track 1 up to 6 will take place.

Interest from visitors at our booth has remained good throughout the three days. Some were still new to the topic of testing User Interfaces, others came by with concrete questions that stemmed from requirements of their application. And we were happy to have been able to positively answer all those questions. Apart from the small number of requests from companies deploying Flash applications. But given our track record it’s probably just a matter of time when a Flash edition will be available.

We also had lots of interesting discussions with other ISVs that are exhibiting their Ajax solutions. The concentration of vendors dominating the market has been extremely high here.

Our flight back to Hamburg is going back late tonight. So we’ll have no stress packing up our things and getting to the airport. Getting some sleep on the plane would be nice but difficult to get as usual. Will give the next sign of life once we have returned and have recovered from the jet lag that we’ll have because our bodies have just been recovering from the jet lag we got from our flight here.

The first day of AJAX World is over and we are now starting into the next day of the conference. After setting up or booth yesterday started rather slow. But people were still arriving until after lunch so that’s ok.

So it was a good time to get to know the other exhibitors and sponsors and see what they are doing. Got to know many of the people behind several of the AJAX frameworks which we support and which we want to support in the future.

After lunch the conference attendees started finding their way to the expo floor and we had plenty to do at our booth. We showed off Squish quite a lot, esp. during the reception after the day at the expo floor many interested people came to talk to us. Having set up a video projector at the both constantly showing a video of “Squish in Actions” certainly worked well.

So let’s hope it will be a busy days today again.

Harri and I arrived yesterday evening in NYC for the AJAX World Expo which will start tomorrow. The flight was one of the more pleasant experiences. Emirates, who flies directly from Hamburg to NYC, really does a good job when it comes to service, food, etc. The on-board entertainment system was also the best I have seen so far. I’ve been playing Mahjongg for the first time in years again so the time went by quite quickly

The hotel which we are staying at in the middle of Manhatten is nice too. But it’s rather cold here esp. compared to the temperatures we had already in Europe.

Earlier today we already checked out the conference location and probably not much will happen today anymore. Jetlag isn’t too bad (ok, I was up at 4:00am already so we will be fit and ready tomorrow to man our booth and take back a lot of valuable feedback and ideas (and leads of course

A customer has reported repeated bounces when sending mail to our support address. Unfortunately we could neither find anything in our server logs nor from the SMTP error message.

So if anyone else is experiencing problems too please drop us a mail at admin@froglogic.com or (as this might one might not work for you either) just paste the error message you got as a comment below. Will try to find a common pattern behind this.

Thank you.

The froglogic web log – short FrogBlog – is officially online as of today.

We have been looking for ways to improve communication with our users for quite some time. A blog seemed like a good choice. We are not exactly a large corporation but keeping each of our users informed about we are working on has already become a challenge. Our development process is also very much demand driven so we invite everyone to make suggestions and provide feedback.

This site is running the WordPress blogging software which appeared to be a good candidate after a little bit of searching. It was very easy to set up. Not as fast as suggested by the The Famous 5-Minute Installation guide but almost. Not much customization has been done on the templates and various settings so far but will surely happen over time.

I see that Frerich has already beaten me with a first post reporting about the experiments has done with post-processing Squish’s XML output. I’m sure each of our users will find it to be an interesting read.