ANNOUNCE: twill v0.7.1, scriptable Web testing.

[C. Titus Brown]

ANNOUNCING twill v0.7.1.

twill is a simple Web scripting language built on top of Python and
John J. Lee's 'mechanize'.  It's designed for automated testing of Web
sites, but it should prove useful for anybody who needs to interact
with Web sites (especially those using logins and cookies) on the
command line or via a script.

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 second public release of twill, version 0.7.1.

(Tagline: "Most of the obvious bugs have been fixed.")

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

Download directly here:

     http://darcs.idyll.org/~t/projects/twill-0.7.1.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.

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Notable bug fixes and features:

  * file upload & HTTP basic authentication;

  * submit w/o submit buttons now works;

  * better error reporting;

  * 'quiet', 'interact after scripts', and 'fail-immediately'
    command-line options.

  * '-' <== stdin on command line.