lecture

From Zero to Hero: Simplifying Development and Testing of GUIs with the Swing Application Framework (JSR-296) and FEST

Developing applications in Swing usually involves solving common problems over and over again. Typical problems include managing application life cycle, event handling, threading and localization. Swing developers need an application framework that provides much of the common infrastructure that most applications need.

That's the mission of the Swing Application Framework (SAF). The SAF aims at recognizing common patterns and best practices to create Swing applications to allow developers to quickly create Swing applications.

Testing Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) is as important as their development. Unfortunately, GUI development has been slow to include automated testing as a core practice, mainly because writing tests for GUIs is difficult. GUIs are complex pieces of software that need to be tested; otherwise they could become a potential source of bugs.

This session will bring you an innovative open source library that facilitates functional Swing GUI testing, FEST. It uses the concept of fluent interfaces to provide a compact, intuitive and easy-to-use API. FEST not only makes creation of GUI tests easy, it also simplifies maintenance by providing many useful features that can help us troubleshoot test failures.

This session covers:

* Introduction to the SAF
* Common problems that the SAF solves
* Introduction to FEST
* Writing robust and maintainable Swing GUI tests
* Creating an application with the SAF and FEST using
Test-Driven Development (demo)