One of the biggest struggles while testing web applications that use AJAX is dealing with the timing issues caused by asynchronous nature of the request. A common solution is using timeouts to wait for the AJAX call to be completed. This could cause lots of timing issues. Using Geb there is a better way to determine that the AJAX call and its callback has been completed.
In this blog post we will test the W3Schools website which has a button on it which executes an AJAX request: http://www.w3schools.com/ajax/ajax_example.asp
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Saturday May 30th was the first NextBuild developer's conference in Eindhoven at the High Tech Campus. The conference is free for attendees and offers a variety of subjects presented by colleague developer's. This meant all talks were very practical and covered subjects encountered in real projects. This adds real value for me to attend a talk. Although it was on a weekend day there were about 150 attendees present. The location was very nice and allowed for a nice, informal atmosphere with a lot of opportunities to catch up.
The day started with a key note talk by Alex Sinner of Amazon. He looked into microservices and explained the features of AWS and especially the container support and the new AWS Lambda service. With the AWS Lambda service we can deploy functions that are executed on the Amazon infrastructure and we only pay when such a function needs to be executed. After the keynote the conference tracks were separated into five rooms, so sometimes it was difficult to choose a track. I went to the talk by my JDriven colleague Rob Brinkman about a Westy tracking platform he built with Vert.x, Groovy, AngularJS, Redis, Docker and Gradle. For those that don't know, but a Westy is a Volkswagen van used for camping trips. Rob has build a platform where a (cheap) tracker unit communicates to a Vert.x module the location of the Westy. This is all combined with other trip details and information in a web application. Every works with push events and the information is updated in real time in the web application. The talks was very interesting and really shows also the power and elegance of Vert.x. Also the architecture provided is a like a blueprint for Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
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