Storing Automated YSlow Tests With Show Slow
I was at a meeting of the Manchester Web Performance Group the other day where Tom Taylor gave a talk about some of the performance testing tool he uses at Laterooms.com. He used a ruby script to set up some preferences in Firefox which then ran Selenium to open some web pages and test them with YSlow. The results of the YSlow inspection are then sent to a Show Slow server where the results can be graphed over time. I realise that I've just mentioned a whole stack of technologies there, so let me pick out the important ones:
Selenium is a remote control agent for web browsers, although it is most stable in Firefox. I have written about this tool before but it allows us to automate interaction with a website via a series of selenium scripts. These scripts can be exported into different code formats, including PHP.