I will be showing off my Selenium Android Farmville Tweeter bot at the Portland Oregon Selenium User Group tomorrow.

What better way to learn Selenium and Android automation then to farm some crops on Zynga’s most famous game!

I will walk you through the steps I took to create my Selenium Farmville Tweeter Bot

First step is to install Eclipse

I recommend the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers version

Next step is to install the Android SDK

Once the SDK is installed launch eclipse and install the Android Eclipse Plugin

Follow the instructions on the Android Eclipse plugin page its easy as pie.

Once you get the plugin installed, it will ask you to restart eclipse.

Restart eclipse and the android sdk manager should pop up.  If it doesn’t you can find it in the menus.

Select install the latest version.

Once you finish the installation it is time to set up the emulator for testing with selenium.

I have an iphone so we will only be talking about the emulator .  Look for a future post of Selenium on the iphone.

The Selenium team has a great page on the Android Driver start here and move down to the “Setup the Emulator” section.  They give you instructions on how to set up the emulator via the command line.  You can also launch the Android Virtual Device Manager GUI within Eclipse

So I have done this on OSX, Linux and now windows.  When I went to create the emulator in windows I got this error.

“Unable to find a ‘userdata.img’ file for ABI armeabi to copy into the AVD folder”

Some googling and I find out I am missing something from the SDK.

So I open the SDK manager and like it is a mind reader it highlights the 2 packages I need….hmmmm

The ARM EABI v7a system Image & the Google USB Driver package

I installed those packages and was able to create my emulator without error.

Now that the emulator is working time to install the Webdriver APK.

Open up a command prompt/shell and follow the instructions here

First we need to start the emulator.  Browse to the tools directory where you put the android-sdk

emulator -avd my_Android

Ran into some errors trying to start the emulator on windows.  emulator: ERROR: unknown skin name ‘WVGA800′

I didn’t have any issues on the other operating systems.  Did some windows troubleshooting AKA rebooting.  I found the issue.  The SDK windows installer installed to C:\program files\android where the eclipse android plugin put it in my home directory.  I am running on XP but this looks like a mod for windows 7.  I modified the plugin to look for the sdk in the program files directory reinstalled some of the libraries and wala!  Ok lets forget this happened and dream of having a new mac book air.

Lets create the emulator in the eclipse gui and start it via command line:

emulator -avd my_Android

Ok so we have it running now where were we….ooh yeah install Webdriver APK.

Open up a command prompt/shell and follow the instructions here

• get the device serial ID
• install the apk
• start webdriver
• port forward

Now our Android environment is set up and running time to write some selenium scripts!

Lets test it out and see if it works.  I like to use Maven.  So that is what we are going to do.  Create a new project and select other-maven-maven project.  Maven is a build tool and makes it easy to do actions like download/install selenium and running tests among a million other things.

• Select the simple project check box.
• Create a junit test under the src/test/java package.  Make sure to create a folder under the default otherwise eclipse yells at you.

Almost forgot we need to add selenium!

Go to Maven – Add Dependency and search for selenium

Select org.seleniumhq.selenium selenium-java hit ok – click maven update dependencies

Now selenium is installed!! Lets go back to our junit test.

Replace the fail(“Not yet implemented”); with the sample code here

The code is a little old so I just take the code out of the testGoogle class and paste it into the test class.

Let eclipse do its work and auto-correct all the error, which imports the stuff we need!

Lets run it!  If you did everything correctly it runs.

So what should we do with all this new found power?  I know lets create a bot that harvests and replants my crops in Farmville and then tweets how awesome I am!

If you go to m.farmville.com it asks you to login via facebook.  Clicking on the link opens a new window for facebook.

In my script I just short-circuit this by opening m.facebook.com and logging in first before heading to m.farmville.com.

It maintains my session and auto logs me into the mobile farmville site.

Once we are in I do a check to see if my crops are ready to harvest!  I check it by doing an assert on the status message and if they are not ready I fail the test.

If they are ready it clicks into the screen for harvesting and continues to harvest and harvest and harvest…like over 200 times it clicks that button!  Glad I have Selenium on my side!

When it is done harvesting it got a little tricky.  Only because the behavior of the application is not consistent.  Sometimes it just grays out the harvest button while other times it completely disappears!  I put the check for “x 0″ crops in a try catch loop that will stop clicking if there is no more to harvest or if the button disappears it will throw an stale element error and handle it nicely.

Once harvesting is done its time to tweet our bumper crop!! (that’s what it’s called right??)  I grab the text elements for how much money I have and what level I am, set those to variables and head on over to m.twitter.com

Once I log into twitter and get session I forward directly to the tweet url instead of looking for a button to push.

Using the values in my $ & level vars I tweet out my Farmville awesomeness!

Here you can see it in all it’s twitter glory!  Mos6yCanTest is my test twitter account.  If you don’t know who John Mosby was you can google him….he is one of my heros.

I did have a lot of problems with stale errors being thrown.  I handle it with try catch and loops.  Not sure if this is due to the large amount of javascript in these mobile sites or if my emulator is lagging to much or what.  Anybody else have these issues with mobile web apps?

Well thats it the famous Farmville Tweeter App!

You can find my selenium scripts out on my github account I think I need to work on my gitignore files a little .

This month some co-workers and I started the brand new Portland Oregon Selenium Users group!

We met a bunch of people and learned a lot at the Google Test Automation Conference so we decided to continue with the momentum and start a user group here in portland.

If you are interested in test automation come join us!  http://www.meetup.com/pdx-se/

Just got back from GTAC. Wow what a great conference!   It was a invite only conference and google picked up the entire bill.  It was a complete who’s who in software test automation.  Made a lot of great contacts, learned a lot and have a bunch of ideas.  Next years is in Paris.  Better start working on my boss right away .

Check out the YouTube Play list of all the sessions

Me and my coworkers were featured in a IBM Rational Case Study.  We had a lot of success with the Rational tools, but we have moved on to Selenium for added features, community and multi-browser capability.

Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon halves testing time

Testing automation with IBM Rational tools dramatically improves efficiency and effectiveness

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/cs/CPAR-8M5MTF?OpenDocument&Site=rational&cty=en_us

I think it has been over 10 years since I wrote my first ‘Hello World’  in Java and this week I became certified in Java by Oracle.

A few co-workers were putting together a study group so I joined in.  I am a sucker for some social geekery.

I have a love hate relationship with Java.

I Love:

• that there are so many things out there written in Java.  Java has a huge resource pool to draw from, including code, applications, tutorials and people.
• that the JVM is being used for tons of new and creative things.
• that it does a lot of stuff well.

I Hate:

• that it is harder then it needs to be.
• the community isn’t innovating much lately.
• that Larry seems to be set on destroying anything good about it.
• eclipse and generally any windows desktop app written in java.

Well off to learn some more Ruby

There is a huge collection of web fonts at: Font Squirell

Font Squirell lets you download fonts in four different formats….of course one format cant’ work for the entire web /sigh.  I only used the WOFF type on my sample site so if you don’t see the correct fonts go upgrade browser, because the WOFF standard is the latest and greatest…or so “they” say.

TTF – Works in most browsers except IE and iPhone.
EOT – IE only.
WOFF – Compressed, emerging standard.
SVG – iPhone/iPad.

Google took this concept one step further and created an API that allows you to dynamically specify and download web fonts and it detects the best file type for the browser your using.  Google Font API

I noticed a lot of pixelation of the fonts so I added a css text shadow that seemed to make it better.  At least on my monitor.  Tell me what you think:

If I zoom in on it I don’t see a difference…so not sure if my eyes are messing with me but I think it looks better.

Of course there was one last hick up on the deployment.  The web server wasn’t set up to handle the mime type of .woff.  so none of the web fonts would load.  A simple web.config file addition fixed that and you can see it all live here:

http://www.jameseisenhauer.com/smpl/fontface/

That’s it for now I think the wife is finally waking up.  Things to do when your dog wakes you up at 4:30am on a Sunday.  Play with @Font-Face and watch Motorcycle Grand Prix racing live from Spain via the web.

The goal was to graph the number of tweets per day I made over 2010.  So began the journey.

1. Download all tweets from api.twitter.com in json format.
2. Install CouchDB on dev machine localhost.
3. Insert all tweets into CouchDB.  CouchDB talks json so this was easy.
4. Map & Reduce tweets so I can get a daily count of all my tweets.
5. Sign-up for free CouchDB on Cloudant.com.  No need to host it myself.
6. Replicate localhost CouchDB to Cloudant CouchDB.  One click with CouchDB’s replicate ability.
7. Using JQuery I called my REST based CouchDB twitter count feed and limited it to just 2010 tweets.
8. Using JQuery Sparklines and some Javascript *magic we get a graph of my tweets over the year 2010!!

*Magic means 1000′s of google searches, debug output lines, errors and a few head scratches.

I also played with some other sparkline capabilities, doing some brainstorming for future projects.
I am starting to love CouchDB.  The elegant simplicity and capability is the perfect match for today’s web.

You can see the live demo here: http://www.jameseisenhauer.com/smpl/jspark/

I have been wanting to do some more jquery, json, javascripty stuff to improve my chops….so I figured I would play with the twitter api this time.

If you follow me on twitter you may have seen that I have had issues creating twitter lists in the past via the twitter.com gui.  Odd errors and cache issues to blame I think.

Well the other day I was able to actually create a twitter list!  So using the api I was able to create a picture board of all the members on my list.

Check it out here:
W4PDXSoftwareScene

For fun I have added 1 company that is from Portland but doesn’t make software….can you find it?

It uses the twitter api to receive a json feed of all the members of the list and their info.  Then using jquery & some javascript magic I churn out the images for each member and you get what you see!  It was a fun little exercise….just think of all the cool stuff you could do.

till next time

jim

Testing embedding github:gist in my blog.

Wow its done!! I made the move from Blogger to WordPress!
The import went really well. Only thing I didn’t like was the blogger tags came across as categories .

I do like all the features in wordpress…plus its just fun to create new websites

I think it looks better then the old site. What do you think?