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Hannah Smalltree, Editorial Director
Well, an important concept to keep in mind is that while AJAX as a technology is Java-specific, the concept of the rich Internet application (RIA) and its real-time, continuous data update is ubiquitous and platform-independent. So if your new company has a RIA-based application, your testing strategy and concepts won't change. The key practices you'll retain will be the concepts of base page validation such as validating the page contents and components; real-time page interaction with the server, such as asking if the RIA events functioning properly and firing at the appropriate time; and overall site performance.
Testing RIA applications is a highly challenging prospect, especially if you approach server testing from the UI layer. With so much going on in the UI, from highly interactive events like mouse-over and such, RIA testing is rarely scriptable with current UI-based tools such as Selenium RC. A key, therefore, to RIA testing is to mimic client-side events with HTTP traffic replays (or traffic generation). There are a number of tools for this on the market today, most of which are server- and platform-agnostic, meaning the tools you use to replay traffic against an AJAX site should also run against a .NET RIA site.
This was first published in August 2009