Erik A. Hanson's Weblog

I was playing with a very JavaScript-heavy web page and wanted my automated tests to use a real web browser. I tried running them inside Safari, but it’s a bit annoying to have my tests take control of my browser. Plus, there were caching issues. So I wrote a very simple web browser with the following features:

• It uses WebKit so it works just like Safari
• It doesn’t do any caching
• It takes a URL command-line parameter and loads it
• It quits immediately [update: I added a noquit paramter in case you don't want it to quit immediately]

It currently has the following problems:

• It’s uses AppKit, so it has a UI. I really wanted it to be a command-line-only app, but I haven’t yet figured out how to do that
• Invoking it is painful: /Applications/wkget.app/Contents/MacOS/wkget -url http://www.apple.com
• It only tests WebKit; one day I might make a version that uses Firefox’s JavaScript engine

I called it wkget and you can download it here. [Update: I had an incorrectly-built version up here for a while. It's fixed now.]

Here’s the code (sorry for the formatting; I had to wrap everything for this very narrow column):

@implementation WkgetController
- (void)awakeFromNib {
  [self gotoUrl:self];
  [webView setFrameLoadDelegate:self];
}

- (IBAction)gotoUrl:(id)sender {
  NSString *url = [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults]
      stringForKey:@"url"];

  if (url == nil) {
    url = @"http://www.apple.com/";
  }

  NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest
      requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:url]
      cachePolicy:NSURLRequestReloadIgnoringCacheData
      timeoutInterval:1.0];

  [[webView mainFrame] loadRequest:request];
}

- (void)webView:(WebView *)sender
  didFinishLoadForFrame:(WebFrame *)frame {
  if (![[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults]
      boolForKey:@"noquit"]) {
    [NSApp terminate:self];
  }
}
@end