I just found out how to work with Eclipse debug tool and was able to integrate it with maven from this article.

Anyway, here’s how you could do it.

Step 1: Setup External Tools for Maven

Go to the Run->External Tools->External Tools Configurations… menu item.

Create a new program configuration by selecting “Program” and clicking the “New” button. On the “Main” tab, fill in the “Location:” as the full path to your “mvn” executable. For the “Working Directory:” select the workspace that matches your webapp. For “Arguments:” add jetty:run or exec:java or any maven plugin that you will use to run your application.

Move to the “Environment” tab and click the “New” button to add a new variable named MAVEN_OPTS with the value (should be a single continuous line):

-Xdebug -Xnoagent -Djava.compiler=NONE
-Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=y,address=8000

If you supply suspend=n instead of suspend=y you can start immediately without running the debugger and launch the debugger at anytime you really wish to debug.

Step 2: Setup the Debug Tool

Go to the “Run->Debug Configurations…” menu item.

Select “Remote Java Application” and click the “New” button. Fill in the dialog by selecting your applications project for the “Project:” field. Select Standard (Socket Attach) in the “Connection Type:”. Set the host to localhost and ensure you are using the same port number as you specified in the address= property above which is 8000.

Step 3: Run the Application

Choose Run->External Tools and select the name of the maven tool setup you created in Step 1.

Step 4: Debug
Choose Run->Debug Configurations… and select the name of the debug setup you setup in Step 2 and press debug.

I was preparing my presentation on Java web testing yesterday and I came up with this interesting idea for my demo. Part of my presentation discusses the web testing framework Selenium. Selenium is a suite of tools to automate web app testing across many platforms.

Also at the moment, I was hooked in the Facebook application development mania. So I tried many of the applications there, just to assess the “possibilities”. HTML games gathered quite a buzz among my friends so I started playing one game called Elven Blood.

And so going back to the interesting idea I came up with. Here it is:

HTML game + Selenium = Game Bot

I sat down did a few clicking in Selenium IDE, copy-pasted the generated code, tweaked a bit to add logic and got this:

import org.junit.Before;
import org.junit.Test;

import com.thoughtworks.selenium.Selenium;
import com.thoughtworks.selenium.grid.tools.ThreadSafeSeleniumSessionStorage;

public class ElvenBloodBot {

	@Before
	public void setUp() throws Exception {
		ThreadSafeSeleniumSessionStorage.startSeleniumSession("192.168.0.2", 4444, "*firefox", "http://apps.facebook.com");
		ThreadSafeSeleniumSessionStorage.session().setTimeout("120000");
	}

	@Test
	public void testBot() throws Exception {
		Selenium selenium = ThreadSafeSeleniumSessionStorage.session();
		selenium.open("/elvenblood/");
		selenium.waitForPageToLoad("120000");
		selenium.type("email", "youremail@account.com");
		selenium.type("pass", "password");
		selenium.click("login");
		selenium.waitForPageToLoad("120000");

		selenium.click("link=Character");
		selenium.waitForPageToLoad("120000");
		String max_stamina = selenium.getText("//div[@id='app_content_21371199019']/div/div/div[6]/div[1]/table[2]/tbody/tr/td[2]/table/tbody/tr[3]/td[2]");
		selenium.click("link=Quests");
		for (;;) {
			Thread.sleep(30000);
			String cur_stamina = selenium.getText("//div[@id='app_content_21371199019']/div/div/div[3]/div/table/tbody/tr[2]/td[2]/div/div[2]/div");
			if (selenium.isTextPresent(max_stamina+"/"+max_stamina)) {
				selenium.click("//input[@value='Do quest']");
				selenium.waitForPageToLoad("120000");
			}
			selenium.click("link=Quests");
		}

	}
}

The bot has a very simple logic, which basically checks the current stamina of my character. If it is full then it will do a quest.

I left the Bot running on Selenium Grid using one of our servers. So I can use my laptop to do real work while watching my character level up.