A way to stress-test GUI

What to do if you need to test the performance of your client-server application, which is not on the Web? For example, some kind of Lotus Notes one. The problem is - you can't even execute several Lotus instances on a single machine, so it's quite a tricky task to simulate multiple simultaneous users.

Virtualization is what you can use in this case. There's an example of working stress testing system consisting of Citrix XenApp terminal server running 10 Lotus Notes instances (eating 50 Mb of RAM each), and a load generator running IBM Rational Performance Tester (which is just a very advanced point-and-click thing), which can safely simulate 20 - 40 concurrent users.

Major bottlenecks of this setup are:

1. RAM on Terminal Server (it's better to use 64 bit solution)
2. Network bandwidth (at least 1 Gbit Ethernet)
3. It takes much longer (up to 4 times) to implement and debug such test cases, compared to usual web testing scenarios
   

BDD is too repetitive?

I've got acquainted with Behavior-driven testing, though it still looks too verbose for me. The aforementioned article doesn't give the JBehave annotation "syntax" examples, which I don't like so much.

UPD: Thinking of our poor testers who were unable to document their functional tests, start suspecting that this is what they might have needed instead of using IBM Rational Functional Tester...

HTTPUnit in DB2 stored procedure

That was nightmare - running HttpUnit as a stored procedure (don't ask me why) on 8.2 was crashing db2fmp to heap dump. After two days tossing xercesImpl.jar here and there, I decided that was enough and upgraded DB2 to 9.5 Viper-2! Pretty cool XML support and a lot of other large-scale-supporting stuff, but all I need is stable interpretation of my precious stored procedure.

And guess what? It works! More or less... Xerces still unable to find something important inside HttpUnit, but at least no crashes. I guess it's because Xerces uses something internal as a classloader, that's why they have so many problems with shared libraries, etc. So, I've just put that nasty JARs here and there and everywhere (yes, that's not any kind of production system, just a learning application) and now it seems working fine. Well, I'm not sure yet, because it's quite a long-running procedure, but I will know for sure in about ten minutes.

Keeping my fingers crossed + +

UPD: Yes, it works finally. Also, I've found a nice article about HtmlUnit vs HttpUnit. Damn.