I'm looking for some advice and insight on how people approach creating Object-level GUI automation. Technically the type of functionality I am trying to achieve is easily described by Squish software. I want to be able to simulate Key-Press and Mouse Click events without relying on Platform-specific pixel displays, and screen sizes. I've tried to use tools like Sikuli, but unfortunately my application varies too from platform to platform to make reliably re-repeatable tests.
Basically what I am looking for is some advice as to where to look at how 3rd Part (EXTERNAL) programs hook into properties of QT Widgets and other objects. I know a long time ago there was something call QtObjectInspector, but this software required you making Source-Level changes to your Qt code to be compatible on top of being unavailable.
If companies like Squish can do it, how are they doing it? Where do you start? I doubt they are looking at very low level memory interactions, sniffing for "Traffic" that looks like QT on each different system, but I may be wrong.
I'm sorry for such a vague question, but I've been researching for over a day and all I can find now is articles about how amazing Squish is.
Thanks!
EDIT:
I looked into QtTestLib, however this doesn't have the "From the outside" kind of access that I am looking for.
Does anyone knows any good visual diagram library, that can help me implement faster an application like visio (but simpler of course), that the user can create entities drag them and create links between them (more than one link), and give the possibility to customize the look of each entity.
Does anyone knows anything to do this (c++)
Thanks
Consider using Qt.
I have heard that somewhere # web I'll be able to find good C++ example of Mediator working with GUI components. But I menaged to find only that GoF sample or things from sorcemaking and similar that aren't helpful to me.
So... do you know where that mentioned GUI sample can be found?
Sorry for that kind of question, but that can be useful for others too.
How about this one: http://www.andypatterns.com/index.php/design_patterns/model_gui_mediator_pattern/. It appears the author is applying the pattern specifically to the 'view' part of the GUI functionality (as opposed to the data modeling behind it).
Not sure if that's what you were looking for...
I would like to start coding a gtk theme engine, but i'm wondering where i can find some documentation, if any exists.
I know how to have look at someone else engine's code, examples, or torture tests and widget factories etc.., what i want instead is any documentation type, design, references, examples or tutorials possibly from reliable sources such as the Gnome foundation or the like.
You know, when coding for the Win32 platform one can pinpoint reliable references on the subject by following the MSDN and then read a variety of other sources to see how the problem has been tackled, if any.
So, where to find an authoritative, reliable and possibly complete source of documentation about GTK theme engine development? Is there any for real?
Later added:
Also, how to debug such an engine? What's the most sane and painless way to perform testing and debugging on such a delicate os' ui component?
Well, you can look for instance at the source for the gtk smooth engine in Ubuntu most of which is in one fairly enormous C file smooth_gtk2_drawing.c. I don't know if that's an especially good example, but probably finding whichever looks simplest or most actively maintained would be a good idea.
A theme engine is typically used to change the shape of widgets among other things. If you're just trying to change the color scheme and so on, you just need to create a theme.
Just like the theme engines, theres not a whole lot of documentation when it comes to creating a theme either. However, there are a ton of examples at http://www.gnome-look.org
So I understand that there are a few options available as far as parsing straight XML goes: NSXMLParser, TouchXML from TouchCode, etc. That's all fine, and seems to work fine for me.
The real problem here is that there are dozens of small variations in RSS feeds (and Atom feeds too), so supporting all possible permutations of feeds available out on the Internet gets very difficult to manage. I searched around for a library that would handle all of these low-level details for me, but came out without anything.
Since one could link to an external C/C++ library in Objective-C, I was wondering if there is a library out there that would be best suited for this task? Someone must have already created something like this, it's just difficult to find the "right" option from the thousands of results in Google.
Anyway, what's the best way to parse RSS/Atom feeds in an iPhone application?
I've just released an open source RSS/Atom Parser for iPhone and hopefully it might be of some use.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on it too!
"Best" is relative. The best performance you'll need to go the SAX route and implement the handlers. I don't know of anything out there open source available (start a google code project and release it for the rest of us to use!)
Whatever you do, it's probably a really bad idea to try and load the whole XML file into memory and act on it like a DOM. Chances are you'll get feeds that are much larger than you can handle on the device leading to frequent memory warnings and crashes.
I'm currently trying out the MWFeedParser #Michael Waterfall is developing.
Quite easy to set up and use (I'm a beginner iPhone developer).
His sample code for using MWFeedParser to populate a UITableViewController implementation is helpful as well.
take a look at apple's XML Performance sample -- which points to using libXML directly -- for performance and quicker updates to the display. Which may be important if you are working with very large feeds.
Check out my library for parsing Atom feeds, (BSAtomParser) at GitHub. It doesn't care about validating the feed, it does its best at returning whatever is valid. The parser covers most of RFC 4287, even extensions.
Here's my solution: a really simple yet powerful RSS parsing library: https://github.com/H2CO3/RSSKit
Have you looked at TouchCode yet? I don't think it has an RSS processor, but it might give you a start.
http://code.google.com/p/touchcode/
I came accross igasus project on sourceforge today. I haven't used it or really checked it, but perhaps it might help.
From their site:
igagus is a web service for the iPhone that allows aggregation of RSS to be delivered in an iPhone friendly format.
Actually, I was trying to suggest you ask on the TouchCode discussion board, because I remember someone was trying to expand it to support RSS. That might be a decent starting point. But I was being rushed by my wife.
But I see now that TouchCode doesn't have a discussion board. I'd still ask the author, though, he might know what came of that effort.
This might be a reasonable starting point for you. Atom support isn't there yet, but you could help out?