On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Tom Hume wrote:
> > > Writing in the appropriate markup language is a tiny part of the overall
> > > effort in building a mobile service.
> > Right. There are also things like testing and debugging, which WML makes
> > harder than HTML.
>
> How come? When it comes to testing on actual handsets, what difference
> does it make which markup language the app is coded in?
It doesn't. However, testing on handsets is extremely expensive, so
you want to minimize the amount of such testing you have to do. Even
testing on an emulator is expensive, if a human has to operate it.
Thus, testing things like site flow and operation, except for a bit of
sanity checking, is best done with an automated test suite built with
tools that do things like emulate web browsers. If your language is
similar enough to HTML (as CHTML is), there are a lot of existing tools
available to help you out with this sort of thing. If you're using WML,
you have to put a lot of work into writing your own, or live without.
Keep in mind that with automated tests a programmer can test in a few
seconds what a tester would take an entire day to do. You get further
savings with this sort of testing in that the programmer has probably
changed a lot less and knows what he's just done, and can thus chase
down any bugs much more quickly. The company itself can often do better
financially because it can respond much more rapidly to requests for
changes in the software.
I work in an environment where it's not particularly unusual for me to
do several production releases in the course of a single day. If we
didn't very broad automated test coverage, we could never do this.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.NetBSD.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Thu Oct 9 13:30:03 2003