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APP DEV EXCLUSIVE
Although integration falls short, multiuser support and new Java agent make upgrading a must
WITH THE LATEST RELEASE of e-Test Suite, Empirix continues its tradition of providing Web site developers with point-and-click simplicity that makes creating and executing test scripts a breeze. However, the new version only partially addresses one of my major gripes about the 7.0 incarnation (infoworld.com /2083): the lack of an integrated scripting language to allow for true customization and extensibility of the test scripts.
Version 8.0 introduces a more scalable, Java-based client simulation agent that accepts Java source code as its scripting input. Although this is an improvement over the previous version (which did not provide access to script source code), the feature is still not fully integrated. For example, there is no code editor within the e-Tester script-recording tool. Customers must use an external IDE, such as the one being developed as part of the open source Eclipse project, to edit the code, which is created in parallel with the proprietary e-Tester script code.
That criticism aside, e-Test Suite 8.0 delivers some attractive if incremental improvements over the previous release. The most important of these is the complete rewrite of the e-Load UI. e-Load is Empirix's automated workload-generation service. Using scripts created in the product's e-Tester recording tool, e-Load allows you to simulate multiple, concurrent virtual users for stress testing and more.
In its previous incarnation e-Load was a native 32-bit Windows app that ran locally on the system with e-Tester and the rest of the suite. Version 8.0 effectively decouples...