selenium

Background
For the past 6 months I've been lucky to be part of the development team for the newly launched Yoursphere.com, a Drupal-powered social networking site which "provides one of the safest online destinations for youth ages 9 through 18 to interact*". To say that Yoursphere is the most customized Drupal site I've worked on would be quite an understatement. One example of that, and subject of this article, the user registration system went from the standard single page - to one which uses 4 unique user creation forms which are integrated within several possible 'registration flows'. The most complex of these involves two of the user creation forms, 8 total screens and third-party identity verification.

Besides being an opportunity to get to know hook_user real well, at the end of creating this system we were left with a larger-than-normal nightmare of, "Wow, I wonder if my new small change just exploded the entire registration system for the site. Hmmmmmm."

(Since writing this article I've posted a newer article about Selenium here)

Based upon my recent research, there seems to be a sentiment in the Drupal-community-at-large (an undefinable thing to be sure) of, 'there's no need to look any further than simpletest for any testing needs' (unit, integration, acceptance, etc). This is counter to simpletest's own documentation (bottom of page) which explicitly suggests to look for other alternatives for acceptance testing.

After Googling to death 'selenium rc drupal', 'selenium rc php', etc I realized that almost no one seems to be implementing Selenium RC within their Drupal workflows.

Scratching my head at this I decided to figure out 'why' by doing an exhaustive search of all things Simpletest and found that it does indeed have support for making acceptance tests (see bottom of article) - BUT - and it's a big but - there's no javascript support.

So I started tracking down how the Drupal community plans to deal with the lack of JS support in Simpletest, and stumbled upon this effort to get some kind of JS testing framework into Drupal 7 head, which if I read things correctly appears to be more about unit testing than UI/acceptance testing. So the current Drupal roadmap for the latter doesn't seem to exist. (anyone have ideas/links to things related UI/acceptance testing for Drupal that I might have overlooked? UPDATE: Just found this link, but also seems to be more on the unit testing side and it's currently seems to be inactive)

At the moment I'm left wishing that getting Selenium RC to work wasn't so painful (it requires installing PHPUnit, which in-turn requires installing a PEAR extension, which for many requires installing PEAR itself).....or to put it another way....currently I'm feeling stuck between tackling something which does what I want but which isn't embraced (Selenium or acceptance testing) by the larger Drupal community, or else tackling something (Simpletest) which is supported by the larger Drupal community but doesn't offer the level of functionality I'm looking for.

Wondering how I can help.

Related articles:
Selenium and Drupal
Unit VS UI Testing
Develop an automated javascript testing framework