I’m proud to announce the release of the Windmill Appliance! Built with the technology provided by rPath, it is currently available as a downloadable installable ISO as well as a VMWare image for you pleasure.

Now, just what is the windmill appliance for, you may ask? Glad you did… Windmill is an Open Source AJAX Web UI Testing framework. For the last couple of months I have relied heavily on this software to properly test the web UI of one of our products, and the results have been quite pleasant. Moreover, the interaction that I have developed with the core developers (I’m always lurking on #windmill at Freenode) has proved to be extremely beneficial from my point of view.

The fact that I can get the windmill software packaged and deployed, ready for use in literally minutes using Conary and rBuilder allows me to provide quick feedback to the developers who, I must say, have been very accomodating to my pestering. :) This appliance is my way to thank them for their hard work, and also as means to help out other fellow developers in need of an efficient way to test their project’s web ui.

It was designed to work as a headless (i.e. simplistic and minimal) appliance where you can remotely conduct your tests. A Vnc server is automatically started on port 5901 for you, as well as SSH so you can get things rolling really quickly. You just start it up somewhere in your network (or even several of them in a cluster) and fire your tests at will leaving your system intact.

Please feel free to ask me either here or on #windmill about the appliance as well as how you too can customize it for your own needs.

UPDATE: The user for the VMWare appliance is root with a blank password. Change it quick! :)