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This is VisualNaCro.
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DISCLAIMER: recorder.pl is not yet functional.
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What does it?
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It is a Perl module meant to remote control a VNC server.
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It includes a recorder (written in Perl) to make it easy to
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record a macro, which is just a Perl script, and which you can
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modify to your heart's content.
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The most important feature, however, is that you can mark a
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rectangle which the Perl script will try to find again when you
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run it. Thus when you play a game and want to hit a certain button,
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you just hit the Ctrl key twice, mark the button, and from then on,
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all mouse movements will be repeated relative to that button, even
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if the button is somewhere else when you run the script the next
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time.
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If you know Tcl Expect, you will recognize this approach. Only this
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time, it is not text, but an image which is expected.
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How does it work?
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It acts as a VNC proxy: your Perl script starts its own VNC server.
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The script now can intercept inputs and outputs, and act upon them.
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In order to write a macro, start
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recorder.pl --script my-macro.pl --timing host:port
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connect with a vncviewer of your choice to <host2>:23, where <host2>
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is the computer on which recorder.pl was started (not necessarily the
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same as the VNC server!). Now your actions are recorded into
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my_macro.pl, and the images you want to grep for will be saved as
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my_macro-1.pnm, my_macro-2.pnm, ...
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In order to finish the script, hit Ctrl twice and say "q".
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Why did I do it?
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Because I could ;-)
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No really, I needed a way to write automated tests. While there
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exist a lot of OpenSource programs for web testing, I found none
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of them easy to use, and for GUI testing I found xautomation.
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Xautomation has this "visual grep" (or "graphical expect") feature:
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given an image it tries to find it on the desktop and returns the
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coordinates. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to record macros
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with it, and it only works on X11.
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As I know VNC pretty well, and there are VNC servers for every OS
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and gadget, I thought it might be cool to have this feature to
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control a VNC server.
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Actually, it makes it even easier: with plain X11, for example, you
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can not know where on the screen the action is if you don't check
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the whole screen. This complex problem is beautifully addressed
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in Karl Runge's x11vnc.
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My main purpose is to run regression tests on different browsers,
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which I can easily do by starting Xvnc and using VisualNaCro.
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How did I do it?
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I wondered long about how to do it. I couldn't take the same approach
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as xautomation: I cannot connect to the VNC server thousand times
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per second. So I decided to create an interface of LibVNCServer/
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LibVNCClient for use in a script language.
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Fortunately, this task is made very, very easy by SWIG. As Perl
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is one of my favorite script languages, I decided to use this.
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But SWIG makes it easy to use the very same interface for other
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popular languages, so you are welcome to port VisualNaCro to
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the language of your choice!
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Isn't it pronounced "Visual Macro"?
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Yes. But I liked the Visual Na Cro play of acronyms. I'm sorry if
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you don't find it funny.
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What's the license?
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GPL. It is based on LibVNCServer/LibVNCClient, so it has to be.
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If you want to port this package to use vncreflector, which has a
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BSD license, go ahead.
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