APP Test Client GUI

Joe Gregorio

Back in March I released the command line Atom Publishing Protocol Test Suite, a utility that, when pointed at a Introspection Service document, would test the conformance of that APP implementation. That was good, and it seems to be inspiring others, but it's not really the best tool. There currently isn't a way to run just a one test, or a subset of tests, and it's not very interactive, just aim it at the Service document and fire it off. I've found that when I am developing an APP server implementation what would be a lot more helpful would be an APP client that I could use interactively. An interactive tool would allow me to incrementally implement the service and test pieces as I get them working. Having an APP client that actually logged the requests and responses and validated as it was used would be an optimal solution.

Introducing the APP Test Client. It does all that. It's a desktop application written in Python using wxWidgets that works as an APP client, logging and validating every transaction. Here is a screenshot of it in action, working against Abdera. Click on that image for a larger version.

APP Test Client in action.

Currently the APP Test Client can:

  • Create, update and delete entries.
  • Handle text, html, and xhtml Text Constructs.
  • Log every transaction in the bottom window.
  • Validate every Atom Entry and Feed against the FeedValidator.

What it doesn't do (Oh yeah, it's a much longer list):

  • Export and Config buttons aren't implemented.
  • No ability to edit the author, or any other part of the Entry for that matter.
  • Currently validation is just for the entries and feeds, not on anything related to the actual protocol.
  • The Add button isn't implemented either.
  • No support for categories.
  • Doesn't traverse 'next' links in collection documents.
  • Only tested on Ubuntu, but given that it's built on wxWidgets it should work on Windows and OS X.

To get up and running you can pull the sources from subversion:

$ svn co\
 https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/feedvalidator/trunk/apptestsuite/ apptestsuite

This will pull down some of the dependencies, such as httplib2 and feedvalidator. Others like wxWidgets and cElementTree you will need to install separately.

To run the application:

$ python appeditor.py

The user-interface is constructed using wxGlade. To modify the GUI: 

$ wxglade appeditor.wxg

Note that you only need to install wxGlade if you are going to modify the user interface, not if you are just going to run the APP Test Client.

So it's pretty rough, feel free to pitch in with patches, tests, documentation, etc. Discussion will take place on the feedvalidator-users mailing list.

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