[Fluxx]

> But where's the full-stack test harness for a Rails app with heavy JS usage, that runs at a reasonable speed, gives us useful traces on the client and server, and doesn't break when I slightly rework my HTML?

If you're talking Python, Lettuce does this is Python, there also is Splinter. You can run selenium with a headless firefox quite easily with Xvfb.

If you're talking rails, Capybara has drivers for Webkit (QI), selenium and even PhantomJS. Their speed is variable, but it's not too bad.

On the "HTML changes break my tests," I'd argue that A) you should write your front end tests not tied to the HTML if at all possible. Refer to elements by semantic names, not XPath or CSS selectors. And be smart about your steps. Make your submit_form() method actually look for a submit button in more than one way. B) you shouldn't have more than a handful of full stack frond end tests. They're hard to write, slow, and don't give much help telling you WHAT went wrong. Most of the time the ROI is only there for verifying a few user paths, but not much more than that.

[benjiweber]

The Page Object Pattern can help reduce the brittleness of automated UI tests.

http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/PageObjects