News

New Open Source Mobile Testing Platform for iOS and Android

• By John K. Waters
• March 7, 2012

Gorilla Logic this week released a new automated mobile testing platform that combines FlexMonkey, the company's flagship open source automated testing tool for Adobe Flex and AIR, and FoneMonkey, its free and open source testing tool for iOS apps. MonkeyTalk is a free and open source tool designed to provide a single environment for testing native and hybrid apps built for both iOS and Android.

A big part of this announcement is the introduction of a new high-level, scripting language for specifying functional test scripts, called MonkeyTalk Command Language. Stu Stern, the company's president and CEO, says that the Gorilla-Logic-developed language is intuitive, readable and easy-to-learn: "You can learn in a matter of hours, if not minutes." It can be used to create scripts automatically, he said, through recording, but users can also create scripts from scratch with the MonkeyTalk IDE or any text editor. The language is designed to allow testers and QA pros to extend it with their own app-specific commands without any programming, he added.

The company created the MonkeyTalk language in direct response to feedback from QA pros using FlexMonkey and FoneMonkey, Stern said. "They really wanted more direct support in the tools for doing keyword- and data-driven testing," he said, "things that you could do before with our tools, but which required dropping down out of our high-level report/playback environment."

Along with the MonkeyTalk language, the MonkeyTalk platform includes an Eclipse-based IDE for capturing, editing replaying, and managing mobile test suites; a MonkeyTalk JavaScript API, which allows tests to mix JavaScript and MonkeyTalk code; and MonkeyTalk Agents, which connect small native libraries to Android and iOS apps to enable recording and playback. The IDE can be run as an Eclipse plugin or a standalone app on Windows, Linux and Mac. The company said it plans to add language bindings in the future for Ruby, Python and Java.

Along with the MonkeyTalk announcement, the company also unveiled what may be the industry's first Quality-as-a-Service (QaaS) platform: the Gorilla Logic Continuous QA Cloud. Stern described the new cloud service as "a radically enhanced way to use our tools." It's designed to allow users to test their apps "automatically, on demand, across dozens or hundreds of mobile devices and simulators," he said.

Gorilla Logic is primarily a software services firm specializing in rich Internet applications (RIAs) and enterprise app development with Java, Adobe Flex, and mobile platforms. The Broomfield, Colo.-based company was founded by a group of former Sun Microsystems execs in 2002.

The new MonkeyTalk platform is free and available now for download. More information on Gorilla Logic's Continuous QA Cloud Platform is available on the company's "What is QaaS" page.