Unit Testing Web Pages

Because our web frontend is written in Tcl (using Vignette) I can’t use the normal suite of java tools to unit test our application. Lately I’ve been playing around with jWebUnit and it’s going really well. It provides a nice level of abstraction on top of HttpUnit but doesn’t feel too restrictive. Plus the Api is really intuitive and my co workers can follow what the tests actually do without having to learn the HttpUnit API or without having to learn yet another scripting language. If you’re looking for a way to jump on the Unit Testing bandwagon (though this is sorta functional testing I guess) jWebUnit is great.

The only difficulty I’m having isn’t jWebUnit’s fault, it’s really our own. Currently all our development servers have a hodgepodge mix of certificates, certifying authorities etc. etc. etc. and most of the time jsse throws CertificateExceptions. We need a nice easy way of generating 20+ certificates, signing them all by a single CA and copying all the files to the dev servers. Something like a shell script that we could wrap up in a:

for i in `cat target.hostnames`; do gencert.sh $i /path/to/ca/cert; done 

I’ve been looking for a while and haven’t found anything, so I guess I may have to write it myself.