[ptt-users] TestMaker 4.4.1 release candidate available, please try it and vote

[Frank Cohen]

A maintenance release of TestMaker 4.4.1 is now available for  
download at:

http://downloads.pushtotest.com/TestMaker441.zip

Please download it and look for problems, documentation bugs, and  
other issues. Please then let us know if you think this build is  
ready for release. We would ideally like to make this release general  
available in the coming week.

Below is a list of changes in the new 4.4.1 distribution:

- TestMaker 4.4.1 requires Java 1.5 or greater. We have started to  
use generics in the source and that causes the requirement. Please  
give us feedback on this decision. If it is a real pain to require  
Java 1.5 then we could back out these changes and save the Java 1.5  
requirement for TestMaker 5 (which comes out later this year.)

- WebObjects and Microsoft IIS users have occassionally found these  
servers returning HTTP redirect response codes with a relative URI.  
RFC 2116 section 14.30 requires the location header to be an absolute  
URI. According to the RFC relative URIs must only be sent using the  
META refresh tag. The TestMaker team does not want TestMaker to be a  
traffic cop for implementations of RFC 2116. So TestMaker 4.4.1  
HTTPProtocol has a special check for the relative URI on redirect  
(HTTP response code 302) and adds the domain name itself from the  
original POST. TestMaker scripts must use the  
http_protocol_handler.connect(1) form to follow redirects. Recorded  
scripts do not automatically add the (1) parameter. Thanks to Aaron  
Romeo, Dominique de Waleffe, and Kevin Dyer for participating in  
developing the solution.

- TestMaker.sh and TestMaker.bat are start-up shell scripts for  
TestMaker on Unix/Linux and Windows operating systems. These scripts  
build a classpath for TestMaker. Previous versions used external  
scripts in the util directory to build the complete classpath. On  
Windows NT and 2000 operating systems this caused a "script too long"  
exception. TestMaker 4.4.1 builds the classpath in the TestMaker.bat  
and TestMaker.sh scripts directly. Thanks to Aaron Romeo for pointing  
out the problems and recommending a solution.

- Scripts using TestMaker_home/lib/agentbase.py would throw a  
NullPointerException if there were no return parameters in a GET or  
POST command. Thanks to Todd Bradfute for a patch that solves this  
problem.
Scripts using agentbase.py to check links to image tags would throw a  
"Has no attribute 'handler'" exception when an exception was  
encountered. Thanks to Todd Bradfute for a patch that solves this  
problem.

- Long running XSTest operations may run out of memory. HTTPProtocol  
has a URLlist that grows while the test runs to keep track of URLs  
and redirected URLs. TestMaker 4.4.1 changes agentbase.py to call the  
HTTPProtocol clearURLlist() method in the config() method. That way  
the list is reset each time the test's setUp() method is called.  
Thanks to Carl Herder for pointing out the problems and recommending  
a solution.

- agentbase.py has a new feature to control the content type of a  
http-post, and also post a pure value as well as key=value.  The post  
method takes an additional optional parameter to set the content-type  
of the post. For instance, post( url, params, 'application/x-www-form- 
urlencoded' ). Thanks to Geoff Meakin (geoffm at gamesys.co dot uk)  
for the contribution.

-Frank