Telerik, a developer of tools and UI components for .NET, has announced WebAii Testing Framework (Beta), a free web automation framework that helps developers and QA professionals write functional tests for AJAX and Silverlight applications, and the Q2 2009 release of its RadControls suite of tools, including what the company claims is the first commercial 3D charting tool for Silverlight.
The WebAii Testing Framework provides a single API that lets users automate the UI of web applications as part of regression testing. Besides Silverlight support, a key benefit of WebAii Testing Framework is the browser abstraction, which lets developers create a test once and execute it against all major browsers.
"WebAii Testing Framework has been designed in partnership with ArtOfTest to address developers' challenges in testing modern web applications. Many people are not running functional testing because the tools are difficult, expensive, and lag behind from a technological standpoint," says Telerik's Svetozar Georgiev. "The WebAii Testing Framework is free, supports complex AJAX scenarios on all major browsers, and most importantly supports Silverlight. Telerik's WebAii Testing Framework removes the barriers to functional UI testing."
In addition to testing AJAX-based applications, the framework has a UI object model that mimics the complete list of UI XAML elements in Silverlight, letting developers perform basic automation actions like clicking, moving, and setting text, and giveing access to all properties such as brushes, borders and even transform matrices.
The Q2 2009 release of its RadControls toolsuite includes UI components, Reporting, ORM and Web Testing solutions. In addition to 3D charting for Silverlight, the enhanced Telerik Premium Collection for .NET includes a full-featured Silverlight Scheduler, combining Outlook-style convenience with advanced editing capabilities; and Visual Style Builder, enabling point-and-click customization of skins for Telerik's RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX. All in all, the Q2 2009 release delivers more than 30 Silverlight controls. Telerik's Georgiev added that "our Q2 release of the Telerik Premium Collection for .NET brings us another step closer to supporting the developer community in all aspects of the development lifecycle."
Most of Telerik's Silverlight components have identical Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) counterparts. Both the Silverlight and WPF suites are derived from the same code base and share the same API. With the release, Telerik continues to support a line of desktop components. The new WinForms volume features performance enhancements in the underlying framework, resulting in minimized memory footprint and efficient re-painting.
