Traditional screen-based applications and solutions represent a significant majority of customer implementations, due to their performance advantage. However, automation solutions to test these applications are very minimal, expensive and have very large CPU/memory footprint. Terminal Automation Tool ("tmagic") is a utility to create an automation framework to address generic screen-based application test automation.

"Tmagic" is a flexible, lightweight tool based on an efficient framework for automating screen based applications.

How does it work?

At the heart of "tmagic" is a generic client engine designed to connect to a "remote server" on telnet port. This is complemented with a scripting engine providing an easy-to-understand syntax and a rich set of features, to help with a wide variety of challenging terminal operations. The real-time logging of "tmagic" makes runtime monitoring of clients easier.

Features

• Lightweight automation framework with no prerequisites
• Small CPU and memory footprint
• Any machine accessible by telnet can be used as "remote server"
• Highly customizable and extendable framework
• Automatic input script syntax verification
• Run-time monitoring and logging facilities
• Installable on Linux

Future plans

• Supports installation on Solaris, AIX and HP-UX platforms
• Extend support for 3270 and SSH servers
• Enhancement of scripting engine to accommodate complex programming requirements
• Monitoring to be enchanced to support remote mode.

Rakesh K. Dash is a Software Engineer at IBM India Software Labs, Bangalore, India. He has worked on TXSeries for the past three years and has expertise in function testing and load/performance testing in a middleware environment. He is currently part of the development team performing unit tests and function tests development and execution of new features. His experience includes transaction processing, middleware, application and system programming on UNIX platform.

He can be reached at rakesh.dash@in.ibm.com.