LiveTestServer - we shouldn't advertise support for Windmill (or we should provide some docs)

[Luke Plant]

After an hour or more of messing around, I really can't get anything helpful out of Windmill (at all, really, but especially in conjunction with Django in any kind of automated way)

The docs for it are pretty bad in terms of structure, so you can't just point people to the docs. (e.g: no proper tutorial, the nearest thing to a tutorial tells you to use IPython, but support for IPython > 0.10 is broken, etc etc.)

I've tried Windmill's own django support, which appears to be very broken, or extremely difficult.

So we shouldn't send people down the blind alley of using Windmill when we really don't support it at all.

Alternatively, if we can provide some documentation for how to use it - equivalent to the Selenium stuff - then we should. If the people who worked on this can comment that will help.

[Julien Phalip]

Thanks Luke for the report.

I'm the one who mentioned Windmill in the doc, mainly to replace the mention to Twill which itself appears to be a dead project. See the old doc: ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/topics/testing/

However, I did not test the integration between Windwill and LiveServerTestCase and if it doesn't work then we should absolutely remove that mention from the doc. Therefore I'm marking this ticket as release blocker.

LiveServerTestCase was designed to be completely agnostic about what testing framework is used. So I tend to think that the issue lies in Windmill itself. Windmill is a fairly active project though, so it'd be nice if it did all work well (and if we could leave that mention in the doc). So I'll reach out to the Windmill maintainers to see if they have any thoughts on how to enable that support within their project.

[Julien Phalip]

There hasn't been any code updates to the Windmill repository since April 2011 [1] or any blog/twitter updates for that project since November 2010. I've also tried to get some feedback on the #windmill channel on Freenode but no one's replied yet. I'll continue trying to get a hold of the Windmill guys.

In the meantime, if anyone is interested, you may also try using Splinter [2] instead as it's a much active project right now.

[1] ​https://github.com/windmill/windmill/commits/master

[2] ​http://splinter.cobrateam.info/

[Julien Phalip]

That said, I see that splinter is actually partially based on Selenium. So that might not really count ;)

[Julien Phalip]

There is also Ghost, which already supports LiveServerTestCase:

​http://jeanphix.me/Ghost.py/#django

​https://github.com/jeanphix/Ghost.py/blob/master/ghost/ext/django/test.py

[Julien Phalip]

Note: this gist contains an example with splinter: ​https://gist.github.com/1685139

[anonymous]

After several attempts I still haven't got any reply in the #windmill Freenode channel. It seems like that project is in idle mode...

I'll remove all mentions to Windmill from the docs. Other projects such as Splinter or Ghost don't seem mature enough to guarantee a mention in our docs. They do seem to work with LiveServerTestCase though, so we could consider mentioning them in the future.

[Julien Phalip]

Oops, that was me. I'll push the doc fix in a minute.

[Julien Phalip]

In [17524]:

Fixed #17652 -- Removed all mentions to Windmill from the docs as that project doesn't integrate well with Django at this time.