Fun with Performance test platform

    In previous blogs, we showed that the NetGend application performance test platform can be used for business - web service performance testing.   This blog covers a story about using it to do something fun.

    It started with my upcoming cruise vacation.  I planed to bring my running shoes and go to gym every afternoon - how else can deal with so much good food?  I used to listen to the NPR radio station while running, but in the middle of the ocean, there would be no radio nor high speed internet, my only choice would be podcasts.  My favorite is the Market Place from APM.

    Searched the APM web site but didn't find the list of podcasts - the best I could find was the podcast for yesterday.  Eventually Google brought me to this page in the apple itune store.  It seemed promising.

     Unfortunately I didn't have iTune installed on my Ubuntu PC and didn't intend to do it only to download these podcasts for my cruise vacation.   While being a little disappointed,  I noticed that the HTML page had something that looked like URLs for the podcasts  (see the highlighted parts in the following).   I copied and pasted one of the values  to my browser's address bar, yes, that was exactly what I had been looking for!

 <tr parental-rating="1" rating-podcast="1" kind="episode" role="row" metrics-loc="Track_" audio-preview-url="http://feeds.americanpublicmedia.org/~r/MarketplacePodcast/~5/bFRhvGqQpxg/marketplace_podcast_20131211_64.mp3" preview-album="APM: Marketplace" preview-artist="American Public Media" preview-title="12-11-13 Marketplace - Certainty?" adam-id="209223815" row-number="0" class="podcast-episode">  
 ....  
 <tr parental-rating="1" rating-podcast="1" kind="episode" role="row" metrics-loc="Track_" audio-preview-url="http://feeds.americanpublicmedia.org/~r/MarketplacePodcast/~5/o6MbaCEnmbU/marketplace_segment24_20131210_64.mp3" preview-album="APM: Marketplace" preview-artist="American Public Media" preview-title="12-10-13 Marketplace - Volcker? He rules!" adam-id="207293711" row-number="1" class="podcast-episode">  
 //more than 20 of them

    To grab all the values of this attribute, we needed to use a XPath like //tr/@audio-preview-url. Luckily it's supported by NetGend. So I wrote a simple script to get all the URLs for the podcasts. Downloading a podcast and writing it to disk is pretty simple.

 function VUSER() {   
      action(http, "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/apm-marketplace/id201853034");  
      a = fromHtml(http.replyBody, '//tr/@audio-preview-url');  
      for (i = 0; i < getSize(a); i ++) {  
           if (match(a[i], /\/([^\/]+)$/)) {  //extract the file name from URL
                fName = g1; 
                println("downloading ${a[i]}");  
                fileName = g1;  
                action(http, a[0]);  //download the URL
                writeFile(fileName, http.replyBody);  
           }  
      }  
 }   

   Running this gave me the podcasts which I then transferred to my smartphone.  I was filled with joy - on the one hand, I got the podcasts I need, on the other hand, I realized that this test platform can also be used for something other than testing!    I know it's possible that there are other tools that can do the above, but can you image a performance test platform is able to  do it so easily?