In my last post I promised a post about something other than Eclipse for my next post. I'm sorry I lied, I had the best of intentions. However the problem of acceptance testing and Rich Client applications has been rattling around in my head for some years now. A couple of years ago I tried this in .NET and didn't have any great success. This time driven by the needs of several projects in my group and reading Bret Pettichord's excellent seminar "Homebrew Test Automation" (PDF) I'm inspired to try again.

Ideally I would just like a library that we can invoke from our test cases (written in Java/Jython - not Vendor Script). However after some digging I've got far more questions than answers. Here are the options that I've been able to find:

1) Roll you own framework - As a side project I went down this path a few months back. I got stuck at the beginning - I could launch my application - but once launched my test harness couldn't regain control. Even if I can get this to work I going to have to extend each SWT/JFace control with additional test methods. That sounds like hard work.
2) Marathon doesn't appear to have any SWT support.
3) Abbot there are some murky references and a wiki entry. However neither Abbot nor its website have been updated since Oct 06. Is usable in its current form? Is it dead?
4) Window Tester from Instantiations: promises a Rich GUI Test Library (hey this is what I want). For $499 a seat this could be a great tool. Does anyone have any experience using it? Does it deliver the value?
5) FrogLogic SquishJava 800 EUR - cute name appears to be tied to a vendor script (yeeccch).

So is anyone doing automated acceptance testing of Eclipse RCP apps (not recording scripts - but writing test cases)? What tools are you using?

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