WAPT 7.0: Web Site Load, Stress and Performance Testing

Alexandria, VA (PRWEB) August 20, 2010

SoftLogica announces WAPT 7.0, the new version of its load, stress and performance testing tool for web sites, web servers and applications with web interfaces.

In contrast to 800-pound gorilla load testing tools, WAPT is designed to minimize the learning curve and give the user an ability to create a heavy load from a single regular workstation. You can create a basic test scenario and get meaningful information about your performance landscape in a matter of minutes. WAPT is able to generate up to 2000 simultaneously acting virtual users for an “average” test scenario using standard hardware configuration (Pentium 4 2GHz, 512MB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet).

The goal of any testing tool is to automatically emulate a real human working with the tested object. When this object is a web site, the tool should emulate a real site visitor. A good testing solution should be able to do everything that can be done by real users: navigate from one page to another by clicking the links, perform search with different keywords, select items from the lists, fill web forms, submit data, etc.

When we are talking about load testing, we assume that the tool should be able to emulate many site users simultaneously. This is where the efficiency comes to play. Even though each virtual user should perfectly emulate a human site visitor, nobody expects it to work in the same hardware and software environment. The tool should be able to create hundreds and even thousands concurrent virtual users with help of a single system.

The newly released WAPT 7.0 continues to combine such accuracy and efficiency and adds a few more long awaited features.

First of all it includes a completely reworked recorder. Here we need to tell what is it and why it is important. As we know, in today’s world everything is automated. Even guru programmers spend more time dragging objects on the screen than typing code. So, it would be funny to expect that anyone would create a web test by coding it with help of some sophisticated programming language. This is done much easier — you simply show to the WAPT what your virtual users would want to do in the test. You open a special browser window and perform all the actions of your virtual user step by step while WAPT records this. Later when you run the test, WAPT will replay everything that was recorded.

That is why it is very important to record all the actions correctly. If it misses even one request in the middle of the session, the test will not work. This is like throwing away a line of code from a program.

At first view this is nothing special. Note however that when people created browsers (some of them are so respectful that we will not even mention the names of these companies) they did not really care about WAPT and load testing. They did not provide any reliable means of recording ones browsing activity. So, any tool that needs to accomplish that task has to rely on its own tricks.

The trick of WAPT is that it works as a proxy between the browser and the web site. This means that when you record a test, all the data is passed through it, so it can save the complete information on the user session, including all requests sent to the server and responses received from it. This is very important for AJAX pages and other JavaScript client applications, because they often produce requests that cannot be intercepted otherwise.

The next new feature is that in this version you can get statistical information for any part of the user session. For example, the checkout process on your web site consists of 3 steps. This means that user should pass through three different pages to complete it. It does not really matter for you how long it takes to load each page, but you want to make sure that the total time for completing all of them is less than, say, 5 seconds. You can join these pages into a single task and get that total time in the report.

And the last feature that is worth mentioning is the ability to compare any web site response received during the testing with the originally recorded one. You know, the testing is generally done to find out if something can go wrong. But when something does go wrong, you usually need to find what happened and mend it. You may want to enable logging and start analyzing each step in a broken session to find the cause. Here is where you will really like this new feature that will automatically highlight the parts of the server response which are different from what was expected. You can compare side by side the response body with the original template.

As usual we do not describe many small GUI improvements that makes the work with the product easier and more efficient. The full list of new features is available on our web site along with the 30 days trial version of the software.

Pricing and Availability:

WAPT is designed for Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/Win7.

The 30-day trial version with full set of features limited to 20 concurrent virtual users can be downloaded at http://www.loadtestingtool.com/wapt.exe. The program is priced at $ 350 (USD) per license. Volume discounts are available. Free technical support is provided by e-mail and by phone.

Publisher & Editorial Information:

IT reviewers are encouraged to use this press release and any other related materials. We will be pleased to grant you a free registration key. If you do not consider electronically distributed software, please e-mail us with the details of your postal address and we will send you a jewel case. Cover media editors are authorized to include the 30-day trial version of WAPT 7.0 in their CD/DVD-ROMs.

Website: http://www.LoadTestingTool.com

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WAPT 7.0: Web Site Load, Stress and Performance Testing