talkshow

Talkshow is a lightweight communications bridge for driving javascript applications from ruby code. It's useful for when you're using a browser that doesn't support selenium or other methods of automation. We use it at the BBC to automate our TAL TV applications.

There are two parts to the implementation:

• Javascript talkshow library
• Ruby talkshow gem

Start by adding the talkshow.js library to your application. Ensure that talk_show is instantiated at an appropriate point in your application lifecycle -- when the application has loaded up for example. Instantiate the Talkshow object and call initialize:

ts = new Talkshow(hosturl);
ts.initialize;

The hosturl is the url of the talkshow server that you will start in a moment.

Add the talkshow gem to your Gemfile, and in your ruby code:

require 'talkshow'
ts = Talkshow.new
ts.start_server

You can execute raw javascript, or invoke javascript methods in your application:

ts.execute( 'alert("Hello world")')
ts.invoke( 'Math.sqrt', [1] )

Changing the talkshow port

You can specify an alternative port to start the talkshow server with the TALKSHOW_PORT environment variable. For example if you are running cucumber tests with talkshow:

TALKSHOW_PORT=1234 bundle exec cucumber

This will tell talkshow to start up the talkshow sinatra server on port 1234.

Using a remote talkshow instance

If you would rather start the talkshow server as a seperate process you can start a seperate talkshow server as follows:

TALKSHOW_PORT=4570 ./bin/talkshow_server.rb

You can tell your test code to use that talkshow rather than starting talkshow in a thread:

export TALKSHOW_REMOTE_URL='http://localhost:4570'

Or you can specify the remote url in your code when you start the server: ts.start_server( 'http://localhost:4570' )

Testing

The main testsuite is a cucumber suite. Install phantomjs before you run the following:

bundle install
bundle exec cucumber

Running the demo

You can run the proof of concept demo if you check out the source code.

Start the test application:

cd $TALKSHOW/test_application
bundle install
bundle exec ruby ./start_app.rb

Open a browser and visit http://localhost:4568/app?talkshowhost=localhost:4567

In a new terminal, start the Talkshow demo:

cd $TALKSHOW
bundle install
RUBYLIB='./lib' ruby bin/demo.rb

Running all three applications to test (web_app, proxying server, talkshow client)

1. Run the proxying server on localhost 4570 -

TALKSHOW_PORT=4570 ./bin/talkshow_server.rb

2. Run the test web_app (the app that simulates an app running on TVs) on localhost:4568

~/workspace/talkshow/test_applications/bundle exec ruby start_app.rb

3. Browse to this URL to connect the web_app with the proxying server, then keep this URL open in a browser:

http://localhost:4568/app?talkshowhost=localhost:4570

4. Open an irb shell for the talkshow client in the root of talkshow bundle:

~/workspace/talkshow/bundle exec irb

5. Use the following to run the talkshow client and connect it to the proxying serer:

require 'talkshow'
ts = Talkshow.new
ts.start_server("http://localhost:4570")

6. In the irb shell, run the following:

ts.execute("console.log("test");")

7. Return to the browser window displaying the web_app, open the javascript console and you should see the "test" message logged to the js console.

License

Talkshow is part of the BBC Hive project and available to everyone under the terms of the MIT open source licence. Take a look at the LICENSE file in the code.

Copyright (c) 2016 BBC