ANNOUNCE: twill v0.7, scriptable Web testing

[C. Titus Brown]

ANNOUNCING twill v0.7.

twill is a simple Web scripting language built on top of Python and
mechanize.  It's designed for automated testing of Web sites, but
it may be useful for anybody who needs to deal with Web sites
(with e.g. logins and cookies) in a non-interactive manner.

twill is a reimplementation of Cory Dodt's PBP.

A twill script looks like this:

   # go to the /. login page
   go http://slashdot.org/login.pl

   # fill in the form
   fv 1 unickname test
   fv 1 upasswd test
   submit

   # ok, there's no such account ;). show error HTML.
   show

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This is the first public release of twill, version 0.7.

(Tagline: "It seems usable to me, but then I'm its author.")

With this release, I'm looking for general feedback on usability, as
well as suggestions on additional use cases.

Download directly here:

     http://darcs.idyll.org/~t/projects/twill-0.7.tar.gz

Documentation is online at

     http://www.idyll.org/~t/www-tools/twill.html

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Miscellaneous details:

twill is implemented in Python and uses pyparsing and mechanize.  In
addition to the existing simple command language, twill can easily be
extended with Python.  twill also provides a fairly simple and
well-documented wrapper around mechanize.

twill scripts can be recorded with maxq, although scripts may require
some hand tweaking at the moment.  See the twill documentation for
more information.

twill does not understand JavaScript, I'm sorry to say.

--titus, titus at caltech.edu