A Tale of Two Automation Tools
summary
Sahi starts in 2005 as a browser proxy that injects JavaScript and reaches SourceForge rank 26; it uses proxy + JS injection to access the DOM, avoids brittle XPath, and introduces near/left/right identifiers to tie controls to nearby text. It implements automatic waits via XHR wrapper so steps retry transparently, ships a recorder that covers about 70% of flows, and evolves into a commercial product (around 2009) with desktop, mobile, SAP, OCR, auto‑healing and a 10–11 person engineering/support team.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Intro
- 4:10sahih
- 5:26sahih evolution
- 12:19focus on testers
- 16:45Testimonial
- 17:12Automation Engine
- 18:09The DOM
- 26:15Event Simulation
- 31:19Automation is not brittle
- 34:20Automation is not production code
- 37:37Automation and Application Code
- 39:50W3C Web Driver
- 41:29Why we moved away from open source
- 43:21Commercial software
- 45:16Customer support
- 46:03Tradeoffs of going commercial
- 47:08Conclusion
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