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BrowserID is an awesome new approach to handling online identity. If you haven’t heard of it then I highly recommend reading this article, which explains what it is and how it works. Several Mozilla projects have already integrated with BrowserID, including Mozillians, Affiliates, and the Mozilla Developer Network.

With all of these sites now integrating with BrowserID (and more on their way) we needed to add support to our test automation to handle the new sign in process. Initially we started to do this independently in our projects, but the thought of updating all of our projects whenever a tweak was made to BrowserID was daunting to say the least! For this reason I have created a project that contains a page object model for BrowserID. This can be included in other projects as a submodule and then updated and maintained centrally.

The new project is called ‘BIDPOM’ (BrowserID Page Object Model) and can be found here. It currently only contains a page object for the Sign In page, however this currently meets the needs of the automation for projects that have integrated with BrowserID. As we have a mix of projects using Selenium’s two APIs (RC and WebDriver), it was necessary for BIDPOM to support both.

By adding BIDPOM as a submodule, we can easily pull the BrowserID page objects into our automation projects and reference them in a very similar way to the main project’s page objects. We can also update the version of BIDPOM simply by updating the git link and updating the submodule. What’s even better is that our continuous test builds running in Jenkins automatically initialise and update the submodule for us!

I hope that in addition to being a dependency for our own automation projects, this page object model can be utilised by others wanting to create or maintain automated tests using Selenium against sites that adopt BrowserID. If you would like to start using BIDPOM then I have provided below a guide to adding the project as a submodule to an existing git repository.

From within your project, add the BIDPOM project as a git submodule:

cd ~/workspace/automationproject
git submodule add git://github.com/davehunt/bidpom.git browserid

This will add an entry to .gitmodules and clone the BIDPOM project to the browserid subdirectory. It will also stage the new gitlink and .gitmodules items for commit.

You can now commit these changes to your project’s repository:

git commit -m 'Added BrowserID page object model as submodule.'

Before you can test the new submodule you will need to run the following command to copy the contents of .gitmodules into your .git/config file.

git submodule init

Now you can test the submodule by deleting the browserid directory and allowing it to be recreated:

rm -rf browserid
git submodule update

The BIDPOM project should be cloned to the browserid directory.

You will now be able to integrate your project with BrowserID! Here follow a few examples of how to integrate your project.

Example: Short sign-in using Selenium’s RC API

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selenium.click('id=login')
from browserid import BrowserID
browser_id = BrowserID(selenium)
browser_id.sign_in('testaccount@example.com', 'password')
assert selenium.is_visible('id=logout')

Example: Long sign-in using Selenium’s RC API

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selenium.click('id=login')
from browserid.pages.rc.sign_in import SignIn
signin = SignIn(self.selenium, self.timeout)
signin.email = 'testaccount@example.com'
signin.click_next()
signin.password = 'password'
signin.click_select_email()
signin.click_sign_in()
assert selenium.is_visible('id=logout')

Example: Short sign-in using Selenium’s WebDriver API

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selenium.find_element_by_id('login').click()
from browserid import BrowserID
browser_id = BrowserID(selenium)
browser_id.sign_in('testaccount@example.com', 'password')
assert selenium.find_element_by_id('logout').is_displayed()

Example: Long sign-in using Selenium’s WebDriver API

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selenium.find_element_by_id('login').click()
from browserid.pages.webdriver.sign_in import SignIn
signin = SignIn(self.selenium, self.timeout)
signin.email = 'testaccount@example.com'
signin.click_next()
signin.password = 'password'
signin.click_select_email()
signin.click_sign_in()
assert selenium.find_element_by_id('logout').is_displayed()

For the latest documentation on the BIDPOM project refer to the github wiki.

Back in 2008, David Henderson and I wanted to try automate collecting client side performance data for the web application that we were working on at the time. We were getting a large number of complaints from users about load time and we need to try solve this. The way that we decided on doing this was to use Selenium, which was already running our tests, and hack the Selenium server to give us the information we needed. What we came up with was showcased at GTAC 2009. It was really good for the time and we were happy.

About a year later just as the new movement for HTTP Archive or HAR as its commonly known was taking off I found that Jan "Honza" Odvarko had created a Firebug add on to export the network tab to HAR. This, when used with Selenium, could mean that we could get the same data that the browser wanted with little to no effort. Run your tests as you were with the new WebDriver API and get it to programmatically install the necessary addons as well as set all the preferences needed. I wrote this for Python and for .NET. This works really well but now limits this type of data to only being collected within Firefox. Some modern web applications can send back totally different javascript and sprites dependant on which browser hits.

What if you could run your Selenium tests and collect the same info as the if you were using the Firebug Net tab but using any browser. Browsermob Proxy is a good way to collect this information and it has a programmatic interface that allows us to set it before our tests start. It can also return a HTTP Archive of the traffic that it is routing. I have released the Python Library for BrowserMob Proxy that can be injected into tests quite easily. I have put an example below.

from browsermobproxy import Server
server = Server("path/to/browsermob-proxy")
server.start()
proxy = server.create_proxy

from selenium import webdriver
profile  = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
profile.set_proxy(proxy.selenium_proxy())
driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=profile)

proxy.new_har("google")
driver.get("http://www.google.co.uk")
proxy.har # returns a HAR JSON blob

proxy.stop()
driver.quit()

If we now feed the data from proxy.har into HAR Viewer we can get a nice waterfall of the traffic as below! Jari Bakken has a useful commandline version called Har.

I recently showed this off at London Web Performance. Unfortunately it wasn't recorded but you can view the slides here

WebDriver, the browser automation framework we all love, is on its way to becoming a browser standard. WebDriver as an OSS project is 5 years old and started being merged into the Selenium project about 3 years ago. From there we have seen WebDriver grow. It has had a lot updates in that time. The team is currently averaging ~100 commits a week.

In the short time, from GTAC 2009 when they were created, the Ruby bindings created by Jari Bakken have had over a million downloads! The Python bindings have around 3000 downloads a week and growing. Jim Evans work on the .NET bindings is great, I don't have figures because of Nuget. Same with the Java bindings. Maven makes it difficult to know how many downloads.

We have also seen that Selenium Jobs have overtook the commercial counterparts. All of these things point to us needing a standard to make sure if we can do the same thing on multiple devices and multiple OSes.

Yesterday we held a W3 meeting in the Google UK office. It was great to be able to get in a room and discuss what needed. A plan was hatched on what needs to be done next, and it is going to be a lot of work.You can see the minutes of the meeting here to see what we discussed.

Mozilla, Opera and Google are happy with the direction we are going and long may it last! It will be great to get Microsoft and Apple involved soon.

Remember that all of this work is happening out in the open and you can watch the Hg repository for the editors draft updates.

This is going to be a really exciting journey!

So it has been a busy and life changing year that just went by. 2011 brought not only a number of new events, and friends, but also a new look on the world around me. It has been fun, and I hope that it is an indication of things to come over the next year, and beyond (no, the world is not going to end).

What have I done in 2011 then? Well here is a list of some of the key things I have done this year (in my opinion):

January through March

This was a large part of my 2011 year. I spent a lot of time and effort on it and I hope to find the time to continue working on it in 2011. Affero (the Latin word for “contribute”) is a community contribution wizard that was developed as part of my A-Level course. It aims to make getting people involved in a community easier for those trying to choose where in the community they want to help out. I spent almost my entire final year of college working on it and it took up the first two months of 2011. There have been a number of posts about it, in fact so many that it even has its own category here on this blog.

Written in PHP and JavaScript it taught me a lot about not only how to develop, and properly document a project, but also a lot about Mozilla and how people feel while trying join Mozilla.

March through April

Next up in 2011 was the launch of Firefox 4. This was a big move forward for not only the web but also for myself. It was the first time I threw myself in at the deep end and organized not only the Firefox 4 Launch Party but also the first Mozilla UK meet, I also learned never to try to do both on the same day.

So on Thursday 21st April 2011 we here in the United Kingdom were graced with a wonderful (even if I do say so myself) party in our (well England’s) capital, London. However the party started well before… in fact it started weeks before, with the creation of the Firefox 4 Launch Team, the launch of Firefox 4, and then the launch of Firefox 4 Mobile. Without these three things there would be no reason for the party at all!

May through June

Well… this was a big time for me, not so much an interesting one but an important one. This was the time that I spend, gone for quite some time from the land of the internet. This was when I was doing my final A-Level exams. These I later found out, were good enough to get into my preferred university, though I will come to that one later.

July through September

Nothing much happened… I worked a lot, saved a large amount of money, then spent it all on a new computer… oh… and I got accepted by the University Of Kent!!!

In the summer I had planned to do a large number of things that never got done and for that I apologise. I did intend to get some updates made to Affero as well as create a tool to track the exposure of hashtags on twitter (about 60% there but not complete). I also wanted to re-write MozHunt and get that out properly with some nice new web technologies that fall under the HTML5 banner. Unfortunately all I have managed to do is drop off the grid even more than when I was taking my exams.

October

This was my first full month at university… I did a number of things such as start my course at university, make a whole new bunch of friends, and join a few societies. I even did a presentation as a Mozilla Rep on who Mozilla are, what we do, and why we do it. I also helped out a little with the planning of the Mozilla Festival, as well as write a post on how I got involved with Mozilla.

Not only was this month a big change for me (spending my first month away from home) but it was also a big month in history. This was the month that the world lost a great man who not only changed the world of tech, but also of animation. Steve Jobs.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

November

Okay… now I know I have said several times things along the lines of “this was a big month”, well they all pale in compare to November. This is defiantly the highlight of my year. Organizing a party… that was amazing. Moving to university, life changing. Though neither of these compares to the time I had over the course of two weeks in November. Not only did I get to go to the Mozilla Festival in London, and during the evening of the second day home to Lewes for Bonfire, and making myself ill, and very tired, BUT I also got to go to MozCamp EU in Berlin! I have no idea how my luck got so good but these two events are the best two events I have been to all year, and I loved every single second!

December

Nothing much happened this month. This time I mean it too… I came home from University, and spent the holiday so far with family. Now onto the present?

Present onto the Future

So nothing much is happening now, I am sat at home, watching… well right now Torchwood, writing this post. So what is it I am planning on doing? Well in late January I am going to be running a little meetup in Canterbury. Oh and come Easter there will be a BarCamp in Canterbury too… and I will be there representing Mozilla. I also plan on working a little more on Affero, as well as on a few new ideas I have had.

What about resolutions… well I have none of those… I never manage to keep them so why bother… instead, I am going to give you my list of New Year wishes for 2012 (thanks for the idea Chris).

This year I wish…

• That everyone can learn at least the basics of hacking the web. To help this happen here are some tools that I will be recommending to people.
  • Hackasaurus X-Ray Goggles
  • Codecademy
• I wish to be able to do more for Mozilla than I have ever done before.
• That everyone takes care of the web, and governments stop abusing it and realize that it is not theirs to play with or restrict.