Email conversation
| From | Vinod Kannan |
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| To | Me |
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| Subject | doubts on http interoperability testing |
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| Date | 26 June 2005 16:12 |
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Hi,
I was searching on the web for http servers and
clients and came upon your pages on broswer speed
comparison.
I work with a small company in India, and we develop
and maintain libraries for http access on mobile
platforms. Our component would be used by others to
develop http clients/browsers. The rendering of the
data is upto the user of our component, we restrict
ourselves to http part of the client. We are http 1.1
compliant ( pipelining etc).
I need to do interoperability testing of our
component. Googling on interoperatbility usually
throws up links to sites that talk about server or
proxy compliance testing for http 1.1. The ones that
deal with clients are about rendering of the client
data.
I am stuck and am not sure how to proceed. Presently
I have compiled a list of http serevr & proxy
implementations. I think, to test the
inter-operability of my component I need to come up
with a set of test cases and run them against the
server/proxy list. I am not sure of how to go about
writing http test cases. ( I am not too familiar with
the http rfc).
Going line by line of the rfc does'nt seem like the
best (quickest) idea. Would you know of any
preexisting test suite for IOP testing of http
clients? Can you tell me how to go about writing the
test cases? Can you suggest a few test cases, so I can
get an idea on what I should do? Would you know of any
other way to do IOP testing of my component?
By the way I was surprised to see firefox did not do
all that well vis-a-vis IE/Operain the browser speed
tests. I use firefox, Opera and IE, and always felt
firefox was faster. Thats what I read in the press
too. Guess its one more hype.
Thanks
Vinod Kannan
| From | Me |
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| To | Vinod Kannan |
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| Subject | Re: doubts on http interoperability testing |
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| Date | 28 June 2005 11:00 |
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Vinod,
> Would you know of any
> preexisting test suite for IOP testing of http
> clients?
Sorry, I did not come across any, which is why I had to use what I did.
> Can you tell me how to go about writing the
> test cases?
You _should_ test the spec, line for line. In fact you should test with
combinations of several lines, including both valid and invalid setups (such
as when the response contains both a 200 and a 301, for example, or when a
location header contains a relative URI instead of an absolute one). If your
component is intended to comply with the spec, then test it against the
spec. Do not just assume that it will work because it passes a few tests.
Most browser vendors have extensive HTTP test suites testing all kinds of
configurations, and some also crawl the web looking for real HTTP servers to
see what sort of valid/invalid responses they give.
I do not have any examples to hand, but you will need to custom write the
tests (unless you can find a comlete existing suite). PHP is your friend,
since you can write simple scripts that do nothing except send response
headers
<?php header('Location: http://example.com/'); ?>
Apache is also useful since you should be able to simulate any set of
response headers. If needs be, write your own simple HTTP server that allows
you to send out custom headers in any order.
> By the way I was surprised to see firefox did not do
> all that well vis-a-vis IE/Operain the browser speed
> tests. I use firefox, Opera and IE, and always felt
> firefox was faster. Thats what I read in the press
> too. Guess its one more hype.
I always knew Opera would be faster, but I was surprised to see that IE was
also faster (assuming it was capable of the required standards level). And
yes. A lot of their campaign does seem to be hype.
The good news is that Firefox 1.1 should implement the same back-forward
mechanism as Opera uses, so the history usage should get a little faster
(not much, because in the previews I have tried so far, it does not cache as
many pages as Opera).
Mark 'Tarquin' Wilton-Jones - author of http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/
| From | Vinod Kannan |
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| To | Me |
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| Subject | Re: doubts on http interoperability testing |
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| Date | 28 June 2005 17:07 |
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Thanks Mark, your website has been very helpful. I
plan to use it as a reference point.
Thanks and Regards