Björn Schotte just contacted me via Skype.

Besides the obvious “Europeans are more hip to this Skype thing than us American’s” comment, it gave me an opportunity to find out what he’s been up to since I haven’t seen him for two years.

Selenium

A quick lookup in PHP shows one package he’s been working on is a Selenium PHP client. Cool!

If you are in Quality Assurance, and need to do automated acceptance/integration testing of web UI, check out Selenium. It’s simply an amazing piece of free software.

It uses the COMET model in order to remote control your web browser for full Ajax/Javascript emulation of your test scripts. But the thing is, it did it before the Comet pattern existed!

Thanks to Paul Hammant of ThoughtWorks for pointing out this product to me over a year ago as a example of how to get around the problem of polling. I keep forgetting to tell other people about Selenium. But every time I do, they are surprised such a product exists.

(I mentioned this product in my 0-60 Ajax talk.)