monotonous.org

LDTP – Take Two

Recently some brave individuals started working on an upstream automated testing project for GNOME. This is exciting.
I say brave because we had a discussion regarding this a couple of years back, and if I recall correctly we stalled when it came to choosing an automation library. Anyway, it was decided that we will be going ahead with LDTP, big step.
LDTP is a mature library, and being such it had accrued sets of requirements from the different utilizers. The core is threaded, and written in cspi, which is unmaintained today, and uses a raw socket to communicate to the client end.
With Nagappan‘s blessing, I started work on a Python rewrite of the core. The main goal being to simplify the code-base and prepare LDTP for the eventual migration of AT-SPI to D-Bus. We also chose to use higher level protocols for communication: XML-RPC. Also, this new version does away with threading in favor of an event loop that plays nicely with AT-SPI events.
After a week of work, I became fairly pleased with the shape it has taken. I used introspection wherever possible as not to duplicate the API both on the client and on the server. The introspection also helps in generating ooldtp’s API, the object oriented interface to LDTP.
The code could be checked out from my github tree.