It's been a while since my last post. I have been traveling quite a bit, meeting customers, partners and together with QTP R&D looking at what the market is telling us and how we should respond in some areas and be proactive in others. One of the top things we got as requests during the last few months is requests to be able to test web 2.0 applications better.

Web 2.0 includes various technologies. When I did the market research I narrowed it down to Flex/Flash, Silverlight and Ajax. Since we already have support with QTP for Flex through our partnership and close relationship with Adobe it was mostly Silverlight and Ajax that were 'green fields' for us. We sat down few months ago and decided this is a major trend that we need to address and even though no vendor out there is doing a good job supporting these technologies well, it justifies substantial resources in order to become THE leader in testing web 2.0 applications. And so, we allocated the resources and I am pleased to see that we have made great progress relatively quickly - supporting Silverlight 2.0 already with a new add-in that is out there and are going to come out soon with an even stronger support for other areas. I am certain that with the upcoming Web 2.0 pack that will be released on top of QTP 10.0 and the next release of Functional Testing (QTP) it will be clear we are leading the automated functional testing market with regard to test Web 2.0 applications.

I look at the challenge of supporting these RIA (Rich Internet Applications) and Ajax technologies as one that consists of the following:

1. What I call tactical support - having support out of the box for the most commonly used web 2.0 technologies (and latest versions) - Flex, Silverlight and few Ajax tool-kits.
2. Strategic directions for testing web 2.0:
   1. Making our add-in extensibility (mostly web extensibility in this case) easier to use, faster to create assets with and separate from the actual QTP to allow as many users/partners as possible to create their own extensibility assets and extend QTP to support whatever is not supported out of the box. With the hundreds of Ajax tool-kits out there and new ones coming out every month or so, this is extremely important for our users as well as our partner ecosystem.
      We are addressing this with a new framework to create extensibility assets called Extensibility Accelerator (EA) which will also be part of our upcoming Web 2.0 pack on top of QTP 10.0
      Together with R&D we are also working on a new white paper that will describe this new EA and best practices on how to use it.
   2. Improving our record/reply and object recognition capabilities to cope better with these new type of controls and events.

We will keep following this area closely and make sure we treat it as a strategic one. Any feedback or comments about this is greatly appreciated.

Till next time,

Roi.