INTRO

It's been so many times when I wrote about swat and sparrow - a tool-chain for rapid web test automation development .

Well, it's time to represent a SparrowHub - a central repository of sparrow plugins.

About swat and sparrow in few words.

SWAT

Swat - is a web test automation framework for quick and simple web test development. There are a plenty of documentation at swat project page HOW to write swat test suites and a lot examples as well.

SPARROW

Sparrow was designed as evolution for swat related development. Sparrow provides infrastructure for swat related projects. It means you could orchestrate and manage various swat tests and run them as well against dedicated web services. Right now it's quite simple console client with ordinary, naive look but I have a bigger plans for it ;-)

SPARROW PLUGINS

Now, let me tell you about sparrow plugins - an essential part of swat/sparrow ecosystem. Sparrow plugins are shareable swat tests suites. Like a bit of tests logic for some application. Like nginx, apache, tomcat or some REST API - whatever you could test over http.

Ok. One could write plugins and then upload them into central repository and finally someone else could enjoy the fruit of his great job by installing plugin and running swat tests from it!

All the workflow to upload/download/run sparrow plugins is provided by sparrow client.

Think about it as of CPAN repository / CPAN client for PERL, but in context of test automation.

SparrowHub and CPAN

Wait, how does sparrowhub, sparrow relates CPAN? Would not it be easier to ship sparrow plugins as regular CPAN modules?

Well yes an no ...

Sparrow plugins are very like cpan modules, internally they might utilize a Carton to declare perl dependencies a plugin author wants to use in a test suite. But after all sparrow plugins are not CPAN modules, they are much simpler in way of distribution process.

Also swat "utilize" PERL as the way to extent your tests, but swat it self is yet another DSL, not PERL. For this and other reasons I decided not to use CPAN and create a dedicated package management system but still fine integrated with PERL and CPAN.

How can I help?

Swat , sparrow are still quite young and could be considered in beta stage, although I work hard to make them mature and stable, and of course it's possible to start playing with this system right now. What you could do:

• Install Sparrow
• Get registered at https://sparrowhub.org
• Install and play with existed plugins ( a few ones now, but see below )
• Write your own ( cool and useful ) sparrow plugin and share with others - by uploading to SparrowHub
• Report issues, features , ideas to swat/sparrow git projects
• Join a contributors team

Whatever you suggest to do to make swat/sparrow better - you are welcome! ;-)

Why?

Probably it'd be the first section of this post ...

I think I'd like to start web tests shareable automation in/for PERL community, so that many people ( not only those using PERL ) could create and distribute automated tests in easy and smart way.