From: Alex Barna on
I know that this question has been asked for several times, but it
surprises that there is no tool under very active development and the
community activities are very low (mailing list posts).

All the tools listed in:

http://pycheesecake.org/wiki/PythonTestingToolsTaxonomy#GUITestingTools

Comparing with AutoIt (www.autoitscript.com), it has tens to hundreds
of posts everyday. AutoIt uses a proprietary BASIC -like language, and
to be honest, I don't like it and I prefer a Pythonic solution.

pywinauto seems to be the best choice but the community has been very
low also. The same happens in pyguiunit, pyAA, WATSUP, all development
seem to be ceased.

So what happens to this field (Windows GUI automation) ?
From: alex23 on
Alex Barna <alex.lavoro.pro...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> So what happens to this field (Windows GUI automation) ?

Either someone cares enough to do something about it, or everyone just
defaults to using AutoIT-like tools.

Which Python implementation are you planning on contributing to?
From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro on
In message
<56a18e2b-4967-4a63-852e-1eb53bb6e561(a)j8g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>, Alex
Barna wrote:

> So what happens to this field (Windows GUI automation) ?

Can't understand the point to it. “GUI automation” is a contradiction in
terms, because a GUI is designed for use by humans to do manual tasks, not
ones that can be automated.

Tasks that can be automated are most easily, flexibly, and above all
reliably, done via command lines and other such scripting interfaces.
From: Steven D'Aprano on
On Tue, 10 Aug 2010 20:05:12 +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> In message
> <56a18e2b-4967-4a63-852e-1eb53bb6e561(a)j8g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>, Alex
> Barna wrote:
>
>> So what happens to this field (Windows GUI automation) ?
>
> Can't understand the point to it. “GUI automation” is a contradiction in
> terms, because a GUI is designed for use by humans to do manual tasks,
> not ones that can be automated.

There have been plenty of systems for recording user actions and playing
them back. They're very useful at times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_recorder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_(computer_science)


You might even have heard of one of them... Emacs. I hear that it's
moderately popular among Linux users.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3769



> Tasks that can be automated are most easily, flexibly, and above all
> reliably, done via command lines and other such scripting interfaces.

That's a matter of opinion, and it clearly depends on the nature of the
GUI and CLI, as well as what task you're trying to automate.



--
Steven
From: Chien on
On Aug 10, 5:56 am, alex23 <wuwe...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Alex Barna <alex.lavoro.pro...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > So what happens to this field (Windows GUI automation) ?
>
> Either someone cares enough to do something about it, or everyone just
> defaults to using AutoIT-like tools.

There were a lot of development but then all ceased, except pywinauto
has a final release in April, but really low community activity. Does
it mean AutoIt has much more advantages than Python tools (which I
have not realized) ?

> Which Python implementation are you planning on contributing to?

I'd say pywinauto. It's more O-O than the other tools. Excerpt from
its homepage (http://pywinauto.openqa.org/):

<quote>
Most other tools are not object oriented you end up writing stuff
like:

window = findwindow(title = "Untitled - Notepad", class =
"Notepad")
SendKeys(window, "%OF") # Format -> Font
fontdialog = findwindow("title = "Font")
buttonClick(fontdialog, "OK")

I was hoping to create something more userfriendly (and pythonic):

win = app.UntitledNotepad
win.MenuSelect("Format->Font")
app.Font.OK.Click()
</quote>

Alex Barna