Selenium tests of Java/Jinitiator/Oracle Forms Applications

[Skip Egdorf]

I am trying to use selenium to test a large Oracle Forms application.

Using TestRunner mode with test cases captured with Selenium-IDE works for those pages that are "real" http with javascript/DOM in front of them.

However, at some places in the application, oracle jumps into its custom interface running on top of jinitiator. For those who don't know Oracle's terminology, jinitiator is a custom version of Sun's java JVM (from around 1.3 I believe) that provided some things that they needed for their interfaces. Jinitiator is a windows-only package that uses some active-X controls and the IE plugin will be downloaded and installed when a mime type of application/x-jinit is needed. It turns out that Sun added everything that Oracle needed sometime about JVM 1.4.2, so it is fairly easy to add the proper mime type to e.g. Firefox's plugin registry on a linux box and run from there using the Sun JVM. Rumor has it that Oracle is depricating jinitiator in favor of the Sun release. In any case, history lesson over, back to trying to run this giant Java client app which we can customize from oracle, but over whose Java code we have no control. In other words, we have this giant ERP system from Oracle that runs against Windows, Linux and MacOS-X using a Java-based client and we want to do regression tests with Selenium.

So, back to the application. Selenium-IDE tracks clicks and such through the initial http-based pages until the point where apage pops up that says "Don't close this page" at which point the embedded java/jinitiator applet is fired with all of Oracle's java code. It pops up a new window from Java that is not seen by the Selenium-IDE/Javascript/DOM level. The java applet runs along, accepting form fill-out and button clicks and page changes and such until such time as the Oracle forms interface exits. At that point Selenium (or Selenium-IDE) wakes up and say "Whew! that page took a long time", not having seen any of the Java-level interactions.

It seems that there needs to be a Selenium plugin or something that extends the idea of intercepting the DOM/Javascript level stuff with the idea of also intercepting Java stuff. This would allow testing of applications that bypass the Javascript-DOM level as does the JVM.

Two final comments:

First: Searching the forum, a few months ago someone asked about jinitiator/Java client testing, and the (somewhat unhelpful) response was to use some other tool for testing fat clients. This is not possible in the case (like this Oracle application) where we have no control over the Java being run. We are not trying to test Oracle's work; we are trying to test the system built on top of Oracle's tools.

Second: I am doing similar tests using Mercury's QuickTest-pro with its oracle and java plugins. I would like to use Selenium as everything else is on a Unix architecture and QuickTest-pro has a number of other limitations. But QuickTest-pro is at least working.


Questions:

Does my analysis of how we might test a java-based application ring true? or are my concepts all messed up?

Does some mechanism exist now for using Selenium to test this Oracle App?

Finally, For the developers... If there is a bit of roadmap and some development needed, I would be glad to help. I have written a Java compiler, but I am not familier with the user interface level stuff in java.

Thanks in advance for any help

[t.chin.pr...@gmail.com]

Skip, real good questions here with ample detail.  Unfortunately, I also do not know the answers and stumbled upon your (very old) post.  Has any development or progress been made on this front?