Using Titanium Desktop to test web sites

I have been using Titanium Desktop for a while now at work, and am not at all impressed with the implementation or stability of the product and wouldn't want to see it being used in any serious project. HOWEVER, it is a brilliant concept which if done well can be humongously successful.

I was faced with the daunting task of testing a web-site written in Drupal the other day. Now, I don't know Drupal but have been told that its got these magic form elements which it used for validation. That couples with cookies meant that I would have to do a lot of work to test even slightly complex flows using python/perl/ruby::Mechanize. That apart, I can NEVER simulate the javascript and other asset loads that a normal user would exercise. For complete end-to-end-testing, I couldn't find anything that I would like using.

Here is where Titanium comes in. It doesn't have the sandboxing rules that normal browsers have, so you can load pretty much any page in a Titanium IFrame and do pretty much anything you want with it!!!!

I have given here an example of using Titanium to search for some text on Duck Duck Go.

To run the example, start Titanium Desktop as kboot --query "Your Search String"

Enjoy!!

Update: Here is a video showing how the automation works.