Learning GEB and Spock - testing

Question

I am a manual tester trying to learn GEB and Spock. To learn these do I have to have prior knowledge of java or groovy? I have been reading the book of GEB, What are the prerequisites, books or learning resources? Please help. Thanks.

Answer 1

I tried compiling some essentials and some 'good-to-haves' that I found very helpful when I picked up Geb.
Some Groovy Magic. Most of all that you need to learn Groovy is covered in this manual but for obvious reasons if you get obsessed with the language you might want to consider Groovy in Action. While Java is not needed to pick up Groovy, If you are from a Java (except for closures) or even a Python background, you could probably skim through the tutorial for 15 minutes and you are there already).
A little Selenium. The more, the better but fear not, this single page tells you all that you need to know about the Selenium Webdriver that you would generally use. But to stress, the more the better.
jQuery selectors (everybody says that it is easy but frankly, I refer to the manual at least twice per hour. I am dumb, so…). If you are new to jQuery, you would want to start from basic selectors and click on the left navigation menu for more. Please note that not all jQuery selectors are applicable for Geb but the selectors section of Geb tutorial wasn't very exhaustive and engaging.
At the end of my testcases, I need to generate a fanciful report which stretches across multiple testcases and I had dependencies among testcases. So, I went for TestNG instead of Spock. Frankly, I didn't give Spock a lot of chance.
PageObjects is actually not a prerequisite for Geb but PageObjects are so awesome that you never wanted to think about Geb outside of it. PageObjects is a cute little pattern which says that you wrap the structure of your HTML page into an Object so that the actual test does not have to deal with it. Hah. Got you. Let me put that in plain English.
Say, you have a registration form with input textbox which has an id of "nametext". How would you get the handle of the textbox? In DOM terms, in javascript, you would just do a
document.getElementById("nametext")
In Selenium, you would do a very similar thing
driver.findElement(By.id("nametext"))
So, if you would want to populate Jason in your text box in Selenium, you would do a
driver.findElement(By.id("nametext")).sendKeys("Jason");
If you do that for all your input fields, very soon your testcases become ugly and hateful. Instead of that, in OO terms, you encapsulate. You create a new class, say RegistrationPage and wrap your findElement and sendKeys as in :
public class RegistrationPage{
…
public RegistrationPage fillRegistrationForm(String name, String email){
driver.findElement(By.id("nametext")).sendKeys(name);
driver.findElement(By.id("emailtext")).sendKeys(email);
}
}
and from your testcase, you would say
RegistrationPage regPage=new RegistrationPage();
regPage.fillRegistrationForm("Jason","jason#bourne.com");
(Even better idea is to wrap your input values into a class and pass it to the fillRegistrationForm)
In fact, Geb leverages PageObjects in a much better way - jQuery selectors to the rescue
class InputFormPage extends Page{
…
static content={
name {$("input", id:"entry_0")}
emailAddress {$("input", id:"entry_1")}
}
}
and in your testcase, you would just say
name.value ("Jason")
emailAddress.value ("jason#bourne.com")