Test Your Web Apps with these Open Source Tools
If you are a Web application developer or a Web automation testing engineer, you will be interested in understanding the issues that your apps could face and also how Web servers work under load conditions. This article presents a selection of open source tools that can test your Web application.
An important phase of Web application development is testing. It helps us to address issues before the application is made open to the public. The security of the Web apps, their basic functionality, their accessibility, and multi-device and cross-browser support can be tested, apart from measuring the overall performance of the apps. Testing ensures that the Web application can handle significant traffic and a number of concurrent users, apart from having the ability to cater to a massive spike in user traffic.
Popular open source tools to test your Web application are: JMeter, Selenium, OpenSTA (Open System Testing Architecture), The Grinder (Generic Jython load tester), Vega, SiteDigger, Nmap, Sahi, Wapiti, Siege, Browsershots, IE NetRenderer, etc. Let us delve deeper into some of the more popular testing tools among these.
JMeter
This is an open source load testing tool, written in Java, and it supports all platforms. It was originally designed for testing Web applications, but has since expanded to other test functions. Apache JMeter is one of the most reliable tools for testing the performance of a Web application. Its features are: Supports different server/protocol types: Web - HTTP,