November 27th, 2018
The annual Robot Framework conference, RoboCon, is coming again in January 2019, and to be honest, I'm quite excited about it. During the last RoboCon I started a fun project about integrating Robot Framework with Jupyter Notebook. Since then a lot has happened, and I have something great to announce!
At RoboCon 2019, together with Nick Bollweg, a Jupyter contributor from Georgia Tech Research Institute, we are going to show, how the tools from Project Jupyter can make Robot Framework even easier to learn, and new robot tasks faster to iterate.
So, thanks to all nice people organizing RoboCon, we are allowed to deliver a hands-on workshop to get you started in writing Robot stuff with Jupyter Lab on your own laptop. No previous knowledge is required – Nick has been working hard to provide single click/command installers for Windows, OSX and Linux. Next we give a talk about our Robot Framework Jupyter work in general and get you excited about all their possibilities for the future of Robot Framework. Finally, you are welcome to participate our development sprint to make the Jupyter Lab even better fit for Robot authoring.
Workshop (Wed 16th)
Authoring Robot Framework test and task suites with JupyterLab
Talk (Thu 17th)
Robots from Jupyter – The Future of Authoring Tests and Tasks in Robot Framework
Sprint topic (Fri 18th)
The future of Robots on Jupyter
For participation details and schedules, please, visit robocon.io.
Wait, what Jupyter? For Robot Framework?
Robot Framework is an open source generic automation framework, known for its testing capabilities and ecosystem, but also more and more used also in other automation scripting, also known as RPA. Jupyter is an interactive computing platform – emphasizing interactive programming, learning by discovering, fast iterations and sharing the results. Jupyter Lab is the latest user interface for Jupyter. It is an easy-to-use web based integrated development environment that can be installed and run locally or provided as a service.
Here is a sneak peak on what Robot Framework and Jupyter Lab could work together:
To summarize the features seen above:
- basic syntax highlighting
- auto-completion for sections, keywords and variables
- inline documentation for sections and keywords
- fast execution of just the work in progress with log, report and screenshots
- with SeleniumLibrary, browsers are kept open for fast iterations
- with SeleniumLibrary, selector auto-completion and interactive picker
Finally, the resulting Jupyter notebook document can be:
- used as such as Robot Framework test suite or resource
- converted into plain Robot text file
- shared with friends (including test execution results and screenshots)
I am expecting this to be only the beginning, so if you got interested, I'm expecting to see you at RoboCon 2019 sprints to share your ideas and help to plan the future of authoring Robot Framework tests and tasks with tools from Jupyter!