/gempesaw/writing

Upcoming updates for Selenium::Remote::Driver

· perl selenium remote driver finders peroumal1 github changes v0.22 cpan features bugfixes driver appium perl bindings me writing self perl webdriver tutorial

We're gearing up for the release of v0.22 of Selenium-Remote-Driver, a set of Perl bindings for the Webdriver project. My primary motivation to get a new release out is to tweak some of the classes to be more easily extended, so that the perl bindings for Appium can be written more cleanly. But, there's also some cleanup for deprecated functions and a few bugfixes included, along with plans for another release in the near future.

  • Before we get in to the changes, here's a heads up about the new mailing list for the perl bindings: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/selenium-remote-driver :D

  • A new subroutine get_user_agent will be making it into the API for Driver.pm as a convenience method to, well, get the user agent!

  • The main changes for Appium were allowing for more dependency injection of classes like ::RemoteConnection and ::ErrorHandler. This lets us tweak things in the Appium module to address discrepancies between Appium and Webdriver. This is also the case for the FINDERS constant defined in the ::Driver class - previously, the constant was privately scoped to Driver.pm, preventing modification from Appium.pm. But Appium has a different list of acceptable finders. So, ea68e0 makes it so the Appium class can declare its own FINDERS constant via the use constant pragma.

  • Thanks to a few updates to Dist::Zilla::Plugin::TravisYML, our Travis tests are passing again on the master branch instead of just on cpan - there used to be test failures just getting Dist::Zilla to install, even though our own tests were passing. The most recent version of ::TravisYML fixed those issues!

  • peroumal1 caught a couple deprecated functions that will now be throwing warnings - get_speed, and set_speed are already no-ops and now will be warning appropriately. The same goes for the drag subroutine in ::WebElement, which no longer seems to be in the (not actually official) JSONWireProtocol.

  • A few bugfixes made it in, including more helpful error messaging when failing to initiate a session on Saucelabs, or when chromedriver is incorrectly configured. There was also a casting issue reported that I still can't reproduce for setting window size where the JSON conversion was using strings instead of integers ("1280" x "1024" vs 1280 x 1024). I still can't reproduce the issue, but I can't imagine the fix to cast the variables into integers causing any other problems, so I'll probably include it anyway.

  • On the horizon, we've got a rewrite of our recording/mocking functionality on the way, courtesy of peroumal1. Looking over the code in their mock-driver-experiment branch, things seem to be shaping up quite nicely. This is a welcome change because we've been dealing with a complicated process and an explicit dependency on LWP::Protocol::PSGI v0.04 to generate our recordings, effectively preventing anyone else from contributing recordings.

  • Speaking of release versions, this is the numbering scheme I'm trying to use. The impression I've gotten is that CPAN version numbering is a bit of a grab bag, so perhaps explanation is in order.

  • A point increase for deliberate releases with new/important functionality - ie, 0.21 to 0.22.
  • A minor version increase for bugfixes - 0.21 to 0.2101 to 0.2102, etc.
  • Dev releases to prepare for the next point release go out on the 0.XX50 namespace and increment - so, 0.2150, 0.2151, etc.