Short Interview with Apache JMeter

Tuesday, March 23, 2010 by Tushar Joshi
Quality Analyst: Hello JMeter can you tell us something about yourself?
Apache JMeter: Hello!  I am a load testing tool.  If you tell me how to perform a certain action I can simulate multiple users doing that action.  This is like cloning users, isn't it?  I am a child of Apache Jakarta project, technically sub project of Apache Jakarta project.  I was created initially to test performance of web sites, but you know what, now I help people test many more things like database performance, FTP server performance and much more. For more information you can visit my home page here.

Quality Analyst: We heard that sometimes you talk Java and Javascript language?  Is this true, and do we Quality Analysts have to know Java or JavaScript to talk with you?
Apache JMeter: Well, simple scenerios of testing can be done with no knowledge of JavaScript but for advanced functional testing you should know JavaScript.  Java is needed only if you are using Java Sampler part of my abilities and if you want to extend my capabilities.

Quality Analyst: You mentioned functional testing just now, so can you also help us testing our software functionally?
Apache JMeter: The answer is yes.  I can help you test the software functionally.  This requires thorough knowledge of the Sampler you are using.  For example in case of web site testing HTTP Request Sampler is used so the request and response patterns of this sampler shall be known to the user.  They can then write assertions on the response to check whether the response was as expected and hence functionally check the response.

Quality Analyst: Do you like a particular browser?
Apache JMeter: This question is confusing.  Let me clear some points first.  I am not a browser.  No, I am not a browser in traditional sense.  Yes I can visit a web site just like a browser do (through my HTTP Request Sampler and HttpClient Sampler) but I do not show that web site on screen exactly as a browser do.  My job is to visit a web site and capture the response sent by that web site.  I can show you the response as TEXT, XML or even in terms of HTML but without executing any JavaScript on that page.

So there is no question of me liking any browser. Browsers and I are different things.  My behaviour is different than any existing browser.

Quality Analyst: I know that you help us record our actions and then you can play them again.  My question is, are those recordings OS dependant?  In other words if I record something on Linux, can I play those actions on a Windows workstation?
Apache JMeter: Oh yes you can.  I can save Test Plans for you and those test plans are in XML format so they have nothing to do with any particular OS.  You can run those test plans on any OS where I can run.

Thanks for your time JMeter.  It was nice talking with you.

with regards
JMeter-Expert Blog Team

4 comments:

مسلم من أهل مصر said...

nice interview ....
excellent way to write a review

TITAN said...

a creative communication :)
Thanks for that

Unknown said...

Hi,

I'm having one task. We are having options to read and write the results to a file. What My problem is I need to get the URLs from an excel file and should load them in JMeter and run the script.

Can any one help me on this.?


Best Regards,
Haneef Shaik

Unknown said...

Framed Nicely.....:-)

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