Another “best year ever” at froglogic slowly comes to an end. We’d like to take the opportunity to thank all our customers and partners for the trust you put in us and look forward to continue working with you in 2012.
Here is a team photo we took at our Christmas Party last week where we toured the Elbe river, harbor and new “Hafen-City” with a barge.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2012!
Your froglogic Team
After an eventful year in the Qt world it’s time for the annual Qt Developer Days again. We are very happy that the tradition continues and as it looks the European event, which starts today in Munich, will be more than well attended.
If you are at dev days too, make sure to drop by at our booth to see what’s new in Squish for Qt and beyond. #qtdd11
More than two weeks passed since Nokia announced that it will adopt Windows Phone as their platform for smart phones. This obviously raised a lot of questions about Qt’s and also MeeGo’s future and a lot has been said in blogs, public and private discussions.
From a personal point, all engineers here are froglogic are big fans of cross-platform software and think that Qt always was and still is the best toolkit to develop C++ GUIs.
From a business point we are of course also very interested in a successful future of Qt. While we as a company are not fully dependent on Qt anymore (about 40% of our clients use use our Squish for Qt product), the Qt market is still a very important one for us.
So for many reasons we are very interested in Qt’s future and further success. We had many discussions with different people and wrote up our take on the situation in an announcement today which you can read at froglogic.com.
After three years in froglogic’s office space it’s time to move on. We’ve outgrown this place after the last hires. Last year we already had to give up on the idea of having a dedicated room for a test lab. The machines got spread out to other rooms. Then, the library room with its sofa had to go. Foosball games were played in the meeting room thereafter which caused quite some scheduling conflicts between work and leisure. This was our third office space. Hard to imagine that we held a KDE quality meeting in the previous one.
When the hiring pipeline and growth projection resulted in 3 people ending up in a single room we started to look for a new space. The choice was quite big and real estate agents were bombarding us with often duplicated offers. Confronted with that freedom we started to become rather picky and filtered out the offers rather generously. Even if the space itself was shiny we discarded all places that did not have sufficient infrastructure around them, lacked nearby public transport or simply meant bigger changes in anyone’s journey to work. Quite some lazy folks we have become! Quickly the big choice collapsed to two almost neighboring places. After some back and forth between the respective interior designers we went for the one that did have so many pillars in the way. Just a few hundred meters away from here in “Gasstraße 18″ which is reminiscent of the gas plant that was operating here about 100 years ago.
The building we’ll move to reminds me a bit about the old Trolltech offices in Oslo where I enjoyed my life from 2000 to 2003. Old industry style building. From the inside, however, we’ll get a very modern black/white contrast style office with a lot of glass. Expect some people to bang their heads and noses against the doors and walls. Cries for inviting people to a house warming party, KDE sprints, more meetings and – most importantly – new developers that can now apply for jobs again! The new conference room table – as big as a small sailing boat – asks to be used and covered with pizza boxes!
The refurbishing of the interior is still going on. The new electric network was only activated today. And after the usual trouble with sub-contractors of Deutsche Telekom we even seem to have a working phone line. The SDSL Internet connection is still untested and besides that a lot of things are waiting to wrong: hardware breaking during transport, long running and forgotten network services not starting up anymore, Telekom deactivating our Internet connection when switching the phone line, etc. So please excuse possibly delayed answers from us during our move which will start on Saturday and hopefully come to an end on Monday at around noon.
We’ll exhibit at the STAREAST 2010 conference in Orlando next week. You’ll find us at booth #2 and on Wednesday 3 PM I’ll give a talk on my pet subject Cross-platform GUI Testing.
Last week I still was a bit nervous about the Icelandic volcano preventing me from flying over the Atlantic. I had seen pictures of booths remaining empty at the industry fair Hannover Messe because company crews and equipment did not make it there in time. But airlines schedules seem to almost be back to normal now. I’ll be flying with KLM and Martinair and was relieved to see that my airline KLM has people monitoring Facebook and Twitter for cries for help from stranded passengers.
My suite case is not yet packed, yet. I am obviously doing anything to avoid it. But the pile of things to take with me (like bags with sweet green gummi frogs) is slowly reaching its final height.
After finally releasing the beta of our upcoming Squish 4.0 release, I decided to highlight some of the less visible, but very cool, Squish 4.0 features. In this post I’d like to talk about the “injectMacWrapper” feature. Until recently it was even unknown to me 
The other day a prospect asked me to present a demo of Squish for Mac to test a well known online meeting software (Cocoa) running on Mac OS X. The challenge here is that the application can’t be started stand-alone, which is usually required so Squish can start it to load the hook into it allowing Squish to connect to the application for testing (listen to events, access objects and properties).
In this case the application can only be started via a web browser when starting a meeting.
So I walked over to Rainer, our Mac expert, if he had an idea how we could support that. And to my surprise, he just pointed me to the example “injection” which can be found in “examples/mac” in Squish 4.0 Squish/Mac packages.
This example basically contains one script which injects the mac wrapper (the Squish hook for Squish/Mac) into a running process and makes the application attachable for Squish that way. Be aware that you have to first open the script and adopt the SQUISH_BASEDIR variable to point to your Squish installation directly. Also you may change the ATTACHABLE_PORTNUMBER if necessary which is the port to which Squish can then connect to attach to the application.
In addition, before starting the application you want to attach to (or the parent process which may invoke it), make sure to set the environment variable DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the “lib” directory of your Squish package so the Squish libraries will be found.
Now start (or get started) the process you want Squish to attach to later.
Finally run the injectMacWrapper.sh script and just pass the name of the process, as you can find it in the Activity Monitor, as an argument to the script. You will see some output and once it is done, Squish can attach to it at the given port.
Now open the Squish IDE (the new, Eclipse based of course ) and go to Squish->Manage AUTs. There add an attachable AUT, choose an arbitrary name and specify the port which you have chosen (or left untouched) in the injectMacWrapper script (specified via ATTACHABLE_PORTNUMBER).
Now you can go ahead and create a new test script and create a skeleton script function such as (assuming JavaScript)
function main()
{
attachToApplication("AttachApp")
snooze(1);
}
where AttachApp is the name you specified as name for the attachable AUT in the Manage AUTs dialog.
Now set a breakpoint on the snooze line and execute the script. When you hit the breakpoint, choose recording, record interactions on the running process and choose end recording.
Using the same method you can insert verifications, use the Spy, insert more recording snippets, etc.
Really a cool feature since it allows to attach to processes which have not been started by Squish or been modified for testing (which is many cases just isn’t possible).
A similar functionality is available in our new “Squish for Windows” edition also combine with other Squish editions so one can e.g. automate a Windows GUI started via Click Once from a web site. Of course also Squish for Qt and Java allow attaching to running applications.
I will talk about these features and cross GUI technology testing more in the next postings.
The fourth quarter of 2009 is a busy month in terms of tradeshows for us. The most busiest so far.
I started out with Qt Developers Days in Munich on October 14th and 15th. The event had a record-breaking number of attendees I believe and we had many interested potential and also existing users visiting our little Silver sponsor booth. It also proved to be a good opportunity to get to know all the new members of the so called “Qt Development Framework” Nokia unit.
Last week froglogic was present at two tradeshows in parallel: Andreas and Roberto exhibited at Eclipse Summit Europe while Jan and I manned a booth at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG). Jan had a safe and rather short trip there from his home in Austin. I, on the other hand, got stuck in Frankfurt because of heavy fog. Got rebooked onto a flight via London Heathrow on the next day. Of course, my luggage did not make it on the plane so I got to complete my emergency set of toiletries.
My wife and me spent the weekend in San Francisco before the US part of Qt Developer Days takes place. Enjoyed the city which was full of people dressed up for Halloween. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether someone really wore a costume or his normal clothes. Went to a show of the musical Wicked – the “untold” part of the 1900 children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
We now moved down south to the conference hotel. It’s located close to San Francisco International Airport. I am convinced that until Wednesday I’ll be experienced enough to tell one type of airplane from the other. But as a beginner I’ll first concentrate on differ landing from starting planes.
Tomorrow Jan and I will use the opportunity to visit some clients in this area. And right after the conference our partner company ICS will provide an open-enrollment Squish training. So lots of activities before I go home.
We spoke to Wolfram Klebel, one of ETM’s development and testing engineers, and asked him what products ETM tests with froglogic’s automated GUI testing tool Squish.
ETM use Squish to test their SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) software – PVSS. This software is used for controlling complex industrial and infrastructure systems including traffic tunnels, water treatment plants, subway systems, and the new particle accellerator at CERN.
Read the full story at our website.
Hi!
Since acquiring Trolltech, Nokia is really pushing Qt to all kinds of platforms and devices. This perfectly makes sense considering the gains of having to create the GUIs only once for all different platforms and devices (desktop and embedded) by using the Qt framework.
Historically, and also when looking at our revenue statistics, the Qt market is very important for us. Our automated GUI test tool Squish, which supports testing several GUI technologies such as Qt, Java GUIs, Web, etc. is the leading tool when it comes to automated Qt GUI testing.
We have several customers in the embedded Qt space already. Due to the recent push from Nokia’s side, we decided to offer more dedicated support and resources in this area.
So today we announced that we officially support testing Qt GUIs on the Maemo platform using Squish
In the near future we will add Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile to the list of supported platforms as well.
While the development of Squish 4.0, the upcoming version of the leading cross-platform GUI testing tool, is on-going, Qtrac Ltd.’s Mark Summerfield talked with some of the people behind the product.
In this first interview, Mark asked froglogic’s founders, Harri Porten and Reginald Stadlbauer, to give an overview of Squish 4.0′s features. In the following interviews Mark will have deeper technical discussions with the responsible developers working on specific features.