WEBViewAB : improving the verification of website viewability through the application of reusability and interoperability

Abstract

WEBViewAB is a suite of applications that addresses the problems that a web designer encounters when testing how a website looks on different platforms, browsers, browser versions, screen resolutions and bit depth values. It consists of a Java listener application which runs on different platforms (e.g. Windows, Linux and Mac), a web application through which a user can choose a testing configuration and a Controller multi-threaded server application that listens for connections from both web applications and Java listeners. Each Java listener running on each testing machine connects to the Controller and sends its available testing configuration. The Controller keeps this information in a continuously updated XML file. When a user accesses the URL of a web application, the web application connects to the Controller and requests the XML file with all the available testing configurations. This XML file is used to generate the user interface of the web application. The user makes his/her choices and submits the chosen testing configuration to the Controller. The Controller parses the chosen testing configuration and sends requests to each Java listener on each chosen testing machine in order to start testing. Each Java listener automatically changes the screen resolution and the bit depth and runs chosen browsers with the website the user wants to test for. Screenshots are taken while the vertical scrollbar and horizontal scrollbar are automatically scrolled vertically and horizontally respectively. Animated GIF files are then created, showing vertical and horizontal scrolling. On testing completion, the animated GIF files together with a log file readme. txt are zipped in a single zip file and attached to an email which is sent to the user. The results of testing are also sent back to the Controller which in turn sends them to the web application.