JQueryUI - Superb GUI Toolkit

There are a lot of tool-kits and software that are purportedly very powerful, flexible, feature-packed etc. But most of them are rather difficult to setup, or have a steep learning curve, or lots of documentation to read,

... ... or ... ...

all of the above.

JQueryUI is the first tool-kit I've used that has instructions in a few succinct lines that I can easily understand, use, and just get it to work!

Highly recommend JQueryUI (and of course, JQuery) for all web GUI development work.

Python Tools for Web Form Interaction

If you are like me, who, needs to write custom automated testing software to interact with devices with web interfaces, the tools you choose will definitely make a big difference to your productivity.

I've discovered ClientForm

... a Python module for handling HTML forms on the client side, useful for parsing HTML forms, filling them in and returning the completed forms to the server.

that is very good news for me, since I have to automate several tasks working with devices that provide only an interactive web interface. Activities like logging in, updating code, resetting the device, etc, that require more complicated mechanisms like cookies, hidden fields, and random nonces, prohibit the use of statically configured form submissions.

I had started off sniffing and dissecting web pages to manually discover the required information to submit dynamic forms. This activity can take me a whole day for just a simple user interface login. ClientForms, by doing all the hard work of parsing the form, has enabled me to cut this down to 15 minutes. I guess the only difficulty remaining is with forms being manipulated by Javascript during submission. I am still learning more about ClientForms but there is much more in the Python community (and for that, Perl) that can be harnessed to make life for programmers more productive.

I shall leave you here. In a subsequent post, I shall share some of the other tools that I have found, and also some history of my programming experience.

Realtime HTML Editor

I've found a useful website which shows you the look of your HTML in real-time as you type it.

It is very useful as it saves the user time from switching between editor and browser to review the changes.

Beware though, if you are using IE8 and you toggle Compatibility View for that page. It will reload, and you will lose all your HTML. So make frequent copies of your code into Notepad, or my current favourite Programmer's Notepad.