New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Donobu – Mac App for Web Automation and Testing

Show HN: Donobu – Mac App for Web Automation and Testing
16 by wewtyflakes | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Been working on a desktop app for Mac that lets you create web flows and rerun them ( https://www.donobu.com/ ). You can optionally use AI (BYOK: bring your own keys) to create flows for you and to do other interesting things, like making vision-based semantic assertions. Also, your data lives on your own filesystem, and we do not see any of it (further still, there is no phoning home at all). A nice benefit of this being a desktop app rather than a SAAS product, is that if you happen to be developing/iterating on a webpage locally, this has no problem hooking into it. What this intends to be a good fit for: - Testing web pages, especially locally. - Exploring random webpages with a stated objective. - Automating tedious flows. Rerunning a flow won't get caught up on using a single selector (many websites randomize element IDs, for instance), there is smart failover using a prioritized list of selectors. - Getting a quick draft of an end-to-end test in Javascript. What this is a bad fit for: - Mass web scraping (too slow). - Adversarial websites. What we are still working out: - Click-and-drag operations. - Websites that are primarily controlled from canvas. - Smoothing out UI/UX (we are two backend engineers trying our best, and are handedly outgunned by real frontend engineers). Fun things to try: - Asking it to assert that a webpage has a certain theme. - Asking it to run an accessibility report for a page (uses https://ift.tt/4GLySPl ). - Asking it to run a cookie report for a page. The tech: - Java 21 for the main business logic. - Javalin 6 for the web framework ( https://javalin.io/ ). - Playwright for controlling the browser ( https://ift.tt/nbuGRDY ). - Axe for running accessibility reports ( https://ift.tt/4GLySPl ). Critical feedback is welcome. Thanks for trying it out! Cheers, -Justin and Vaz