For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Windmill project, it is a Web Testing and Automation Framework that was built around our testing and automation of the Chandler Server Web UI. You can view our first announcement of Windmill here.

Useful links:

See you there!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Windmill, it is a framework we have built at OSAF for automating tests against our Web Calendar User Interface. In other words, it’s a slick way to save yourself some time by creating tests that will insure the quality of your web page as you are developing them. We at OSAF have some very advanced needs for the project, so the more you use it, the more you will discover all of the other features that make it as impressive as it is.

A few months ago Windmill became an official OSAF project and has been gaining steam every since. After a long period of working out glaring adoption blockers we came out of stealth mode to present at OSCON in Portland and are now actively building our community.

We have made the setup process as easy and well documented as we possibly can, and encourage anyone interested to install Windmill and give it a try. We do our very best to respond to all outside feedback, and make ourselves available in the IRC channel (#windmill on Freenode) to solve all your Windmill issues. OSAF takes transparency in it’s projects very seriously and we are committed to making the project easy for you to get involved, and encourage outside contributors and feedback.

This release includes many new features and bug fixes:

- Windmill Unit Tests, for all your future contributors out there to make sure you didn’t break anything!
- Browser launcher support for Safari and Firefox Linux, no more manual proxy configuration.
- Lots of performance and stability improvement, say goodbye to those t-box hangs.
- The assertion explorer tool, now point and click to create your assertions.
- Javascript tests, write tests in Javascript to test deep down in that app’s source.
- Commenting in all of the test files, including JSON.
- Windmill support for testing against localhost
- Fully functional WIndmill Integrated Development Environment in all the browsers.
- Controller additions of many wait and assert functions, get better control of your tests.
- Convenience features including automatically giving you the correct focus when working in the IDE, smarter logic in the DOM Explorer.
- DOM serialization, you can now pause your tests and get the state of your page on command.
- Cross domain, frame and window recording and testing
- And much more…

Any documentation you may need is available at our website, http://windmill.osafoundation.org and if you find any areas that could use improvement we encourage you to signup and add to the WIKI.

Other documents you may want to jump straight to:

• The Windmill Mailing List
• The Windmill Book Index
• Installing Windmill
• Logged Tickets
• Source Repository

Recently we spent an evening presenting at the Bay Piggies User Group at Google in Mountain view, you can read a recap here.

Wednesday morning, Ted Leung and Mimi Yin will be giving a presentation “Open Design, Not by Committee”, about our experiences incorporating designers into an open source development process.

Katie Parlante will be giving a Chandler project update during the “State of Lightning Talks” on Thursday morning

Also on Thursday morning, Mikeal Rogers and Adam Christian will be talking about Windmill, the tool that we use to test the AJAX based user interface for Chandler Server (Cosmo).

There will also be a Chandler BOF on Thursday night, so please come by and say “Hi”. Since the Preview release is just around the corner, now would be a great time to check in and find out what’s been happening.