Java Automation Support

[ziga34]

Hello guys,

Hope that you're having good time here in this community. I have one question and it's important for me to get a clear picture of this product capability and what developers can develop in future.

Company where I'm working searching for universal scripting/automation tool. At the moment we have team of 20 people and using AutoIt for automation Windows desktop applications.
One thing we are missing in AutoIt is ability to automate (button clicks, copy/paste text and etc.) Java applications. I think at the moment WinBatch doesn't support Java as well, at least I couldn't find this info. So my question(s):

1. Does it support? If no, are you considering to add support in future? There is Java Access Bridge framework, but it requires wrappers around it to work on AutoIt/WinBatch... And we don't have resources to start this.
2. Just to clarify - WinBatch supports MSAA and UI Automation frameworks from Microsoft? Can I spy all win32/winform/wpf/and all other possible interfaces and simulate clicks, copy/paste data from fields?

Tank you in advance.

BR,
Ziga

[td]

Hello guys,

Hope that you're having good time here in this community. I have one question and it's important for me to get a clear picture of this product capability and what developers can develop in future.

With a couple of notable exceptions, WinBatch future development projects are not advertised in advance.

Company where I'm working searching for universal scripting/automation tool. At the moment we have team of 20 people and using AutoIt for automation Windows desktop applications.
One thing we are missing in AutoIt is ability to automate (button clicks, copy/paste text and etc.) Java applications. I think at the moment WinBatch doesn't support Java as well, at least I couldn't find this info. So my question(s):

1. Does it support? If no, are you considering to add support in future? There is Java Access Bridge framework, but it requires wrappers around it to work on AutoIt/WinBatch... And we don't have resources to start this.

The short answer is WinBatch does not support automation of Java application UI's.  Over the years there have been a few user attempts using WinBatch.  But as far as I know nothing that is both easy and useful has every been reported to us.

Since the big Java security scare awhile back, what little interest there was in Java UI automation has disappeared off the radar.

2. Just to clarify - WinBatch supports MSAA and UI Automation frameworks from Microsoft? Can I spy all win32/winform/wpf/and all other possible interfaces and simulate clicks, copy/paste data from fields?

WinBatch does not directly support MSAA  (Microsoft must have ran out of 3 letter initialization and was forced to start using 4 letters).  However, the functionality can be accessed through WinBatch CLR (.Net) hosting as the .Net framework has classes that are covers of MSAA COM functionality.  One of the basic problems with MSAA is that it often requires support by the targeted application to work well and not all applications are written with that support in mind.  Most of the MSAA support automatically supplied by the OS is also handled by the Control Manager Extender which is simpler to use.

WinBath has direct support for UI Automation that is implemented using Win32 functions.  This functionality can be used on native (Win32) and many .Net (Winform and WPF) applications.  WinBatch's Control Manager Extender works very well with native application and the system UI.

WinBatch also has Roboscripter which is a script generator for UI automation scripts. It simplifies the task of writing Control Manager Extender based scripts.