[Webtest] Better way to integrate users' proposed steps

[Marc Guillemot]

A proposotion to find a better way to integrate users' proposed steps

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New steps posted in this list get lost

Users post new steps (the last was Matt Raible's <sleep> step on 08.10.2003) in 
this mailing list but they don't get integrated. I guess as well that other 
users have written some custom steps that are working well for their own needs. 
All this work does not benefit to the community.


Webtest standard

Even if I'm now a committer, I can't integrate rapidly something like the 
<sleep> step as it would require to write unit and functional tests to respect 
the library standard. It takes time and it's not always so easy.


Add a "contribution" package

I think that this quality policy is good and should stay the rule. But we could 
add something like a com.canoo.webtest.steps.contrib package to provide a way to 
incorporate new steps that don't (yet) fit in the standard. Theses steps 
wouldn't aim to stay in the contrib package but should be refactored and moved 
to the "normal" packages when someone takes time/finds a way to write 
appropriate functional and unit tests.

I think that, with such a facility, the number of avalaible steps will rapidly 
increase (personnally I've some steps like verifyimages, extractlinkparameter, 
enablejavascript, ... waiting that I take time/find a way to write the 
appropriate functional and unit tests before beeing incorporated).

If we decide to use such a way, we should document what is needed to accept a 
new step. I see:
- the step class
- the description of the step action and of it's attributes (name, description, 
required) (we could use xdoclet to generate the doc from the java files)
- a code sample

Waiting for comments...

Marc.