One of the greatest frustrations when building RIAs for mobile browsers such as the iPhone, Safari, Webkit for the Android and Palm, and even IE for Windows Mobile phones is the lack of functional testing tools. Yet if you are making a RIA that is complicated or used for critical work, it behooves you to develop some approach to testing that is not completely manual. Furthermore, if you are serious about performance, you need to make sure your application is working functionally so you can create performance profiles that reflect a solid working application.

The mobile application development community is sadly lacking in the functional testing department, but there are some interesting projects you should check out. If you are developing RIAs for the iPhone or other WebKit-based browsers, you should look at the Watir and especially the SafariWatir project. Watir is a wonderful, Ruby-based, open source library for automating web browsers, and it is often used to perform functional tests on web applications. The SafariWatir project focuses on supporting Safari on the Mac and, after some modifications; you can easily use it to drive Safari for iPhone testing. If you are interested in using SafariWatir for iPhone testing, you should look at the additions my coworker, Ryan Schutt contributed to the project which allow you to use XPATH or hook into JQuery tabs. We often use a stripped down version of JQuery for mobile RIA applications. Based on a lot of internal effort, we have found that you can automate most of the testing of an iPhone application with SafariWatir although you occasionally run into minor differences between the Safari version on the iPhone and that on the Mac.

In our next posting, we’ll be looking at some tricks and tips for debugging and validating performance on the iPhone or other WebKit-based platforms. In specific we will look at adding a wrapper to WebKit to expose functionality that is not usually made available as well as talk about native wrappers in general and the number of options they allow RIA developers looking to increase usability and performance

Read more from Robi Sen.