[ANN] Puffin 0.8.8 Released -- Web App Regression Testing Just Got Easier

[A. Keyton Weissinger]

** PUFFIN 0.8.8 RELEASE! **

It's my distinct pleasure to announce the release of the 0.8.8 release
of the Puffin web application testing framework! This is the most
powerful, easiest to use puffin release YET!

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Highlights:
- MUCH EASIER TO USE.
- NEW DEMO APPLICATION, CONFIG FILE AND TEST PLANS INCLUDED.
- BETTER HTTP RESPONSE ANALYZERS.
- MORE POWERFUL INPUT TOKEN PROCESSORS.
- MORE FLEXIBLE OUTPUT TOKEN PROCESSORS.
- MANY DOCUMENTATION IMPROVEMENTS.
- ASSORTED BUGFIXES. 

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Details:
- (MUCH EASIER TO USE) In response to LOADS of rigorous testing, user 
feedback and code refactoring centered on ease-of-use, Puffin has been
significantly simplified in terms of configuration and test plan
construction.

- (NEW DEMO APPLICATION, CONFIG FILE AND TEST PLANS INCLUDED) With this 
release is included a Perl CGI demo application with affiliated sample 
configuration and test plan files of various types. You can play with 
these files in building your understanding of Puffin and can extend 
them when it comes time to build tests for your web application. 
[Thank you, Ernie Hershey!!!]

- (BETTER HTTP RESPONSE ANALYZERS) More powerful test action response
analyzers. In previous releases of Puffin, the focus was on providing 
response analyzers for Puffin to execute against ALL test actions in 
your test plan. In this release, the focus is more on providing more
customizable response analyzers to allow for more robust testing of 
specific, dynamic test actions. This makes Puffin even more useful 
for involved test actions in more complex web applications.

- (MORE POWERFUL INPUT TOKEN PROCESSORS) There are now two new input
processors which allow for retrieval of the next item in a list 
(where list items are specified either through list item parameters
or through the name of a token containing a list object).

- (MORE FLEXIBLE OUTPUT TOKEN PROCESSORS) More flexible output 
processors allow you to extract very complex information from your
test actions' responses (easier regular expression processing, for 
example). 

- (MANY DOCUMENTATION IMPROVEMENTS) The documentation has been 
updated to reflect the many framework changes to the puffin system.
All examples now reflect code from the demo application. The setup 
of the demo application has been added to the Getting Started guide.
Finally, I cleaned up the nasty Word generated HTML and removed the
RTF versions of the documentation. 

- (ASSORTED BUGFIXES) Several places in the code docs and user's 
guide referred to PUT when I meant POST. This [INCREDIBLY STUPID] 
error has been fixed. There were problems with sending both a 
querystring and a posted value. This has been resolved. There were 
several issues with logging that have been resolved. 

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What is Puffin?
Puffin allows you to test any web application or service. Once 
customized to your web application, you can use Puffin to unit test 
individual web pages, system test your entire web application, or load
test your entire site.

Now in its third public release, this web application testing framework 
is even more flexible and robust than before. Have a complex web 
application that needs to be rigorously tested? Puffin is the answer!

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Why 0.8.8?
As you will see when you start using it, this version is a huge
evolution over what was there in 0.8.5. However, to be fair, most of the
changes in this release are features that should've been there all 
along, so I only moved the release number 0.0.3 points!
;-)

Check out Puffin TODAY at http://puffin.sourceforge.net

Keyton Weissinger
keyton@weissinger.org
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