Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Robot Framework Newsletter, December 2011


Introduction

Welcome to the second installment of the Robot Framework newsletter. I hope you have survived Christmas, and are looking toward a successful year 2012!

The news


Robot Framework 2.7 in development


The development of Robot Framework 2.7 has proceeded reasonably well and the new rebot implementation is considered done, In the end, we managed to reduce both memory consumption and execution speed of rebot around 50% compared to all previous releases. At the same time, log and report generation when using pybot has also gotten more efficient.

There are still a number of open issues targeted for 2.7, but some of those are not going to make it to the final release. Our goal is to fix the remaining defects and release some sort of alpha after that.

RIDE 0.40 in development


We've also started development of RIDE 0.40, which will contain two major improvements:

  • A plain text editor mode
  • Support for aligning columns in test case and keyword tables.

The plain text editor will be enabled by default, and it will allow editing of a whole test case or resource file at a time. The changes are synced between the plain text and structured editor.

If a test case (or a keyword table) contains other than default headers, that table is interpreted as data driven, and the columns will be aligned according to headers when written in plain text format. It is possible to edit the table headers using the plain text editor mentioned above.

In addition, Robot Framework 2.7 fixes some parsing related bugs and inconsistencies that have been blocking some RIDE issues and these will be resolved in RIDE 0.40.

SeleniumLibrary 2.8.1 released.


We recently released 2.8.1 version of SeleniumLibrary. It upgrades the bundled Selenium server to version 2.15 (with support for Firefox 8)

ATDD demo with Robot Framework available.


Pekka Klärck and I presented a session called "Acceptance Test Driven Development Using Robot Framework" at EuroStar conference earlier this year. The demo application is available as a Google Code project.

Upcoming events


Here's a list of upcoming events that are going to feature Robot Framework in one way or another.