[Koha-devel] I played with Cypress (and ERM and Vue)

[Victor Grousset/tuxayo]

Hi :)

Nice to hear that. How was coding UI tests compared to Selenium?
And the API tests compared to the current way?
It's good that Cypress provides an alternative to both.

The Cypress section of this comparison with Puppeteer, Selenium, and 
Playwright was not impressive compared to Puppeteer and Playwright.
https://www.testim.io/blog/puppeteer-selenium-playwright-cypress-how-to-choose/

And it seems some parts of Koha (with pop up windows) wouldn't be 
testable with Cypress :o
https://docs.cypress.io/guides/references/trade-offs#Multiple-tabs
and I think the workaround wouldn't work for us since our pop ups are 
used to fill a field in the calling window: 
https://github.com/cypress-io/cypress-example-recipes/tree/master/examples/testing-dom__tab-handling-links

Also about iframes, with Firefox, Cypress can't at all interact inside 
them. Could that be an issue if one day we want to use Cypress in Koha? 
Given that Koha has a few minor iframes.

But it's the only Selenium alternative in the 3 to have a community 
development. As opposed to Puppeteer and Playwright being developed >95% 
by Google and Microsoft respectively. So who knows if one of the two has 
so much success that Google or Microsoft drops their efforts on 
maintaining the other one. Or one looses traction. It's not the first 
time they would drop support to a project[1] and Firefox support should 
be expected to always be precarious. (it's still experimental for Puppeteer)
On the other hand it's libre/open source so we can hope on the long term 
there will always be a community to do the minimal maintenance. Hard to 
say about Firefox support though.

[1] There is some dev stuff the following lists. Not enough to be 
certain of the risks. (So I'm might be spreading FUD due to GAFAM 
allergy) But enough to be wary about projects whose top committers are 
from a single company. Which totally have the right to change their 
priorities, no issues with that.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
https://killedbymicrosoft.info/


Cheers,

-- 
Victor Grousset/tuxayo