maspwr

This looks really great. Baking in support for test automation seems like a no-brainer and a welcome step forward for web development.

Are any other major browsers taking a similar approach to Safari in terms of native WebDriver support? I saw this Microsoft blog [1] on Edge support of WebDriver, but it's not clear to me what approach they have taken (you still need to download a separate server for instance).

Only one Safari browser instance can be running at any given time, and only one WebDriver session can be attached to the browser instance at a time.

One downside to this approach is that it limits the ability to parallelize tests on a single machine for efficiency purposes.

1. https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/07/23/bringing-auto...

It depends on your perspective. Vagrant is billed as a manager of development environments. It has a well known and easy to use workflow for creating/modifying/destroying those environments (vagrant up/provision/destroy). With its Docker integration, it provides you with a nice management layer for managing those Docker development environments. You could achieve the same thing with Docker directly, but there would be some non-zero amount of work required to create your workflow commands and share that development environment with others (whereas with Vagrant you just need to share a Vagrantfile).

Here's an interesting Stack Overflow question related to this topic, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16647069/should-i-use-vag.... Also, it looks like Docker is working to build out its own development environment tools using Fig, but that seems a bit nascent right now.

As mentioned in the article, Vagrant actually comes with built-in support [1] to run Docker containers. Ideally it would obviate the need to do some of the manual work done here to get this type of environment up and running.

  The Vagrant support for Docker uses boot2docker, which only supports VirtualBox, so I’m left high and dry.

You can use a proxy Vagrantfile to configure the type of machine that is used as the Docker host [2]. Unfortunately there is a bug [3] that make this not quite usable yet.

1. https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/docker/index.html

2. https://github.com/maspwr/vagrant-docker-dev

3. https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/4856

As another example of using genetic algorithms for breaking things, a friend of mine wrote his dissertation [1] on using genetic algorithms for file format fuzzing. I believe there may even be some source code available on GitHub.

[1] http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/1347/

That exact use case is not currently possible, but it's something we've talked a bit about. We're still considering doing something like it in the future.

He (Andrew Godwin) also recently gave a talk on the subject, (http://lanyrd.com/2013/djangocon-europe/schgcz/).