A review of "Endless Forms Most Beautiful" by Sean Carroll. (This is a book on evolutionary developmental biology, which is one of the things my lab works on.)

In-process WSGI testing

Reached a stable point with a little side project: wsgi_intercept. This is a broken-out version of my in-process WSGI testing stuff

that works for all of the Python Web testing tools I could find. Specifically, I monkey-patched webtest and webunit; provided a urllib2-compatible handler; and subclassed the mechanoid, mechanize, and zope.testbrowser Browser classes.

I ran into some minor but nonetheless annoying problems along the way. For example, Zope (which is needed for parts of zope.testbrowser) cannot be installed with "easy_install zope"; the PyPi page doesn't link to a download page, and even when downloaded, Zope calls 'setup.py' 'install.py' instead. This confuses easy_install.

I also couldn't figure out contact info for either Zope or CherryPy (the owners of webtest). I didn't look terribly hard, but the PyPi contact e-mail for Zope is a subscriber's-only list, and <team at cherryp.org> (which is the e-mail address at the top of webtest.py) doesn't exist. CherryPy folks -- someone, please contact me if you want the patches to webtest (or just grab them from the wsgi_intercept code yourself, of course!)

And easy_install seems to be confused by packages with '.' in their names; zope.testbrowser doesn't install with just an 'easy_install zope.testbrowser'. (Spoiled, aren't I, to expect it all to work so easily!)

But these are only minor gripes. On the whole, the packages I downloaded and modified had nice, clean source code. I think there's something about people who write testing tools that leads them to clean up their code ;).

A few quick off-the-cuff opinions, while I'm at it:

• zope.testbrowser is indeed a simple, clean interface to mechanize. (Python2.4 only, however.)

• I like the way mechanoid (a fork of mechanize) has broken out the class structure of mechanize into files.

• If I needed a minimal Web testing tool, I'd use webtest.

• funkload (based on webunit) looks pretty neat. (In the Python world, it's probably the major competitor to twill; they're focusing a bit more on load-testing, though.)

• people should use ClientCookie rather than urllib2, I think. It does more, and it's written by the same person ;).

• One of mechanize's big problems is its retention of backwards compatibility. John seems intent on keeping python 2.2 and up working in mechanize; I think that complicates the code more than it should.

Anyhoo, g'nite.

--titus