This Python on the Toilet issue is also available as PDF. WSGI is a Python standard for how web servers can interact with web frameworks. It’s one of my favorite standards: it’s simple yet very powerful. To write a WSGI web application you only need to create one function. def my_app(environ, start_response): start_response('200 OK', [('Content-Type', 'text/plain')]) return repr(environ) The function receives a environ argument - a dictionary with all the environment variables. The start_response function can be called with the status line and a list of headers as soon as you’re ready to send output. ...

As announced, I held a talk today about testing. I’m now making the slides (in German) and the code examples available. Slides (PDF, 1.5 MB) Python code examples (ZIP, 12 KB)

This Tuesday, November 3, I’ll give a presentation about testing at the Internet Briefing in Zürich. The talk will be in German. If you are interested, inscribe yourself on the Internet Briefing site. The content of the presentation will be based on my current Setting up a full stack for web testing series.

This post about unit testing is part of the Setting up a full stack for web testing series. Introduction In functional testing, also referred to system testing or blackbox testing, you don’t just test the individual units but the whole application. So you’re testing if all of the small units you built and tested actually work together. For functional testing a web site I talk to the application in HTTP. As mentioned already in Unit testing, an example for an address book would be to create an address using the provided web form, then check that the detail page renders and that it shows up in a list or search result. ...

Next Saturday, October 24th, there will be a Barcamp at the Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil. We’ll be talking about mostly geek-topics during the event - though the topics depend entirely on you as a participant. Come and participate. I’ll present as well, though I still have to find a good topic. You can find all the details and inscribe yourself on the official BarCampRapperswil page. I hope to see you there.

This post about unit testing is part of the Setting up a full stack for web testing series. Introduction A modern application is split up in many functions, classes or modules. In unit testing you test the individual components and make sure they work as specified. This contrasts with functional or integration testing where you test multiple components at once. As an example let’s assume you’re writing a web based address book. There will be functions to get a list of addresses from the database, update an address in the database, verify credentials of a user who wants to log in, etc. All of these will be tested with unit tests. A functional test on the other hand would for example test the web frontend by creating an address using the web form and then check if it can by found by the integrated search. So a functional test will rely on many of the base units. ...

This post is part of the Setting up a full stack for web testing series. The initial setup of the testing framework is very crucial. You need to make it as easy and fast as possible for all developers to run the tests. You also need to make sure those tests are executed automatically even when developers become too lazy. That second part I’ll cover in the continuous integration post at a later stage. ...

Many developers see the value in getting started with testing their web applications, but don’t know how to actually start using it. I’ll write about a variety of products and processes which cover the whole range of testing web applications. The posts in this series will be published in the coming weeks. You can find a rough table of contents below but the list may get modified or extended. Approach Initially you must spend some thoughts on how you want to approach testing. The main obstacle is that almost always you start with an existing project that already has a big code base. It seems impossible to ever get enough testing in place to be meaningful. But my experience shows that even very little coverage can already improve quality of your system a lot. ...

The Semantic Web is one of those technologies I’ve heard so often that I got tired of it. But lately I’ve become more interested in one aspect of the whole Semantic Web: graph data. Graph databases are basically one of the many different ways to store data - something which is currently being hyped under the awful name “NoSQL”. So much so that Neo4J, one of the well-known graph databases, even uses that term in their title now. ...

It’s no secret that around here we are big wiki fans. But the paradox of wikis is that it’s so easy to collect information that suddenly there is too much of it. And that makes it hard to navigate the information. So a wiki must constantly be refactored - especially the navigation structures. But no matter how good your navigation structures are, how do you make it easy for newcomers to get into the wiki? Our main space at Nektoon contains 452 pages at the moment - that’s after only six months of existence. At local.ch, my former work, there is a lot more after several years of wiki usage with many more people involved. ...