What is the Robot?

To make a long story short, the Robot is a test framework that provided by Nokia, and which wrote by Python.

In this issue, the term "Robot" is not the "IBM Rational Robot", it is just a litter and flexible framework. It's technical platform allow you to develop plugins, you can use java or Python to do so. For example, as default, there is no module support testcases to login into a server via SSH, you should develop your own SSH lib, in this case, you can encapsulate an existed SSH lib to suit the interface.

We use this framework as our default test tools, including testing login, console output, database query result, and so on.

The Robot uses HTML files (It is NOT XML) as the configuration files, all information, such as test cases, functions (the Robot call functions "keywords"), are stored in the HTML files, each type of information have it's own table definition.

The issue is, the structure of the HTML causes the difficulties of editing and reviewing the configurations, so I want a tool to support these works. I do not want to use Microsoft Expression or Macromedia Dreamwaver. I think, the resource used by testing processor must be well-considered, so, I want a specified tool to do with.

The company which procedures the Robot have not released the tool to us, the only way is developing by ourselves. As you know, if you are a programmer, if there is no tool to select, you should develop one.

Finally, I choose Microsoft .Net 3.5 as the low-layer platform, because I want keep my technology fresh. And more, It is faster than other languages, such as JAVA.

So, let's go.