Test Your Website with AWbot

CGIDir
Tuesday, June 6, 2006; 06:42 AM

AWBot is an free, easy-to-use tool for testing a website.  The project site is located at http://awbot.sourceforge.net/.  It contains documentation, F.A.Q section, and downloads.

Features of AWbot:
AWbot connects to your web site and make URL requests like any other visitors.
AWBot is not a web indexing robot but a web client tool that emulate some visitors browsing on your web site to test its stability after a development change, to test its reliability and/or response to heavy load.
You choose which pages you want to test in a test/config file (parameters in URLs or forms can be easily supplied).
Then you can launch AWbot as often as you want to test your site, get benchmarks information or make some load benchmarking (AWBot can be launched with several simultaneous process). AWbot supports the following feature:
* Easy to use (create one test/config file) and run (an "auto" mode for sites with no forms soon available).
* Support sites requiring Basic HTTP authentication.
* Can make different pre-post tasks before-after a test (external script, SQL commands...).
* Can check each HTML page resulting of HTTP requests to verify if contents contains/does not contains particular keywords or to extract values.
* URL or params to use in test can be dynamically defined (using values catched from previous page).
* A multi-session test launcher to run several simultaneous tests for load benchmarking.
* Report errors, response time for each page and average response time.
* A lot of other feature to match your test needs.
* Absolutely free with sources (GNU General Public License)
* AWBot has a XML Portable Application Description.


Requirements:
* You must be able to run perl scripts (.pl files) from command line and/or as CGI.
If not, you can solve this by downloading last Perl version at ActivePerl (Win32) or Perl.com (Unix/Linux/Other).
* You must add the following perl module (Time::HiRes) to have time with milliseconds.
* You can also add DBI/DBD database perl module if you need to make direct pre-post SQL commands.