SOASTA Awarded Patent for Visual User Interface of its CloudTest Platform

Santa Clara, CA (PRWEB) March 8, 2011

SOASTA, the leader in cloud-based performance testing, today announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued the company patent No. 7,844,036 entitled, "Visual Test Automation Tool for Message-Based Applications, Web Applications and SOA Systems." The patent covers a visual or graphical user interface (GUI) design that expresses a complete programming language for Web and mobile application performance test creation. Analogous to creating a song or video using digital multi-media editing products, this visual interface enables testers and performance engineers to quickly build and maintain complex performance tests using SOASTA CloudTest's task-specific editors.

"SOASTA's unique, patented design delivers a familiar and easy-to-use 'GarageBand-style' visual test creation process that enables users to build complex performance tests in a fraction of the time it takes using older, script-based methodologies," said Ken Gardner, founder and executive chairman at SOASTA. "SOASTA has broken new ground in performance test creation, automation, and scalability. These visual interface editors are a key innovation that can help organizations create and perform quick changes in critical performance tests in a world of rapidly changing Web and mobile applications."

SOASTA CloudTest's visual testing environment is based on a visual mixing board metaphor found in today's popular digital media creation tools. It uses building blocks that allow a user to compose test scenarios by dragging and dropping recorded messages in the form of icons onto different test tracks. Test tracks can represent alternate user scenarios or geographic locations within a larger test composition. The process of editing or assembling test scenarios to generate complex, parallel message streams targeted at websites or mobile applications may be considered analogous to assembling a song, movie, or multi-media presentation in digital media presentation tools. A user may also access the underlying message contents to adjust consumer wait times, eliminate testing third-party components such as CDNs, or meet other specific testing requirements.

Comprehensive performance testing has traditionally required the user to have extensive programming knowledge. In traditional testing software, users must write complex procedural C, or C-like code, or build a long series of messages - typically using Extensible Mark-Up Language (XML) - to simulate real-world traffic. These XML messages are often assembled by hand or using a programming language such as Perl or JAVA. This testing process is prone to errors because even the smallest mistake can invalidate the entire test. Maintaining the scripts and updating them to reflect system changes is also a difficult process.

"The extended time and specific expertise necessary to conduct performance tests using traditional software has prevented many organizations from testing at all, putting their business-critical websites at significant risk. SOASTA CloudTest eliminates these obstacles, empowering organizations to easily and quickly develop tests and run them at scale, using our market-proven visual interface and robust platform that delivers the full power of cloud computing," continued Gardner.

SOASTA CloudTest Platform

Last month, SOASTA launched the latest addition to its CloudTest product line, CloudTest Pro. CloudTest Pro is a new appliance that delivers the world's largest platform for testing the performance of Web and mobile applications. With CloudTest Pro, testing teams have full control to build, execute and analyze performance tests, with the flexibility to launch tests on a single platform that integrates data center infrastructure and private clouds with external resources including public clouds. CloudTest Pro represents the first commercial software solution that seamlessly integrates heterogeneous clouds and other resources to create a truly global test platform.

SOASTA will be demonstrating the CloudTest platform and its patented visual interface on March 8 and 9 at the Cloud Connect show, booth #515. To see a demo online, please go to http://bit.ly/faFEsD.

For more information about SOASTA CloudTest products, visit the SOASTA website at http://www.soasta.com, contact SOASTA at info(at)soasta(dot)com or call 866-344-8766.

About SOASTA

SOASTA is the leader in cloud testing. The company's CloudTest products and services leverage the power of cloud computing to quickly and affordably test consumer-facing Web and mobile applications at scale, providing customers with the confidence that their business-critical Web applications will be reliable and scalable, even under extreme loads. SOASTA's customers include many of today's most successful brands, including American Girl, Chegg, Gilt Groupe, Hallmark, Intuit, Microsoft and Netflix. SOASTA is privately held and headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information about SOASTA, please visit http://www.soasta.com.

ZK Announces the Availibility of ZTL to the Java Community as the First Testing Suite Allowing Visual Comparison Testing Based on jUnit and Selenium

London (PRWEB) August 09, 2011

ZTL is an open source testing tool providing automatic recording and testing for ZK applications, offering developers the ability to rapidly create testing cases in order to verify functionality and features of their applications. The suite is built upon standard testing libraries jUnit and Selenium, combining together to provide seamless integration with the ZK framework without having developers to worry about the configuration of the selenium environment.

Additionally, the ZK team has taken testing to a whole new horizon by introducing the concept of ICT (Image Comparison Testing) providing an easy way to test component positioning. The reason and motivation behind developing this vision testing method is because it requires a lot of effort and time to verify all the status and styling of layout components and/or widgets by using normal unit testing techniques. This, therefore, has led to the idea of visual comparison as it would be much easier, efficient and less time consuming to visually compare screenshots to allocate any discrepancies than to write numerous lines of assertions to achieve the same outcome.

The basic mechanism of vision testing is to firstly encapsulate the image comparison algorithm into a Java API called verifyImage() which then compares the current image with the standard version of the image. If an area is any different from the standard image, the test case will throw a jUnit AssertionError exception. to identify the area which failed and store the result for debugging purposes

ZTL is a powerful testing suite providing developers ease and convenience to test their ZK applications whilst leveraging both the client and the server side by simulating client action and sending them back to the server. ZTL now also supports scripts generated from ZK selector integrated Selenium IDE (without a need for a UUID generator) combined with Eclipse to test applications more quickly and effectively. ZTL is now available and has been gaining positive reviews from users around the world, to use ZTL, please refer to the project home page.

About Potix

Potix Corporation develops and supports ZK, the #1 Java based Ajax solution on SourceForge.net, the world's largest open source host. Innovation is the most driving force behind the growing Potix. Potix delivered the first Ajax framework to support Java and Android phones, the first embeddable Ajax spreadsheet, and the first to synergize the power of pure Java, markup and scripting languages.

ZK has more than 1,500,000 downloads since its first release in late 2005. ZK is deployed by a large number of Fortune Global 500 companies, including Barclays, Societe Generale, Swiss RE, eBay, Roche, Deutsche Bank, Sony, Sun Microsystems, Audi, EMC and Toyota, providing them with the ability to rapidly create rich Ajax enterprise level applications.

###

Related Ebay Press Releases