Gremlin.js: Throw a thousand monkeys at your page

For those who don&#x27;t know: this is PROBABLY named after Palm OS Gremlins. Palm OS had a debugging tool called &quot;gremlins&quot; that would randomly tap and type and gesture all over your Palm OS app. This debugging tool would often find edge cases that would end up crashing your app.<p>As someone who used to program for Palm OS a lot, I was pretty happy to see this name. :)

The 1984 Macintosh had a similar testing tool called The Monkey.<p>Andy Hertzfeld: <a href="http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Monkey_Lives.txt" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.folklore.org&#x2F;StoryView.py?story=Monkey_Lives.txt</a>

I think this is essentially &quot;Fuzz testing&quot;[1]. Something I read about in a book years ago but never saw done in real-life. The term may be antiquated at this point. [1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fuzz_testing</a>

Netflix also has a famous division of monkeys that they unleash to take down servers in the hive, and generally muck about.<p>They want to break as many things as possible while keeping uptime and that sounds freaking awesome! :D

Hi! I&#x27;m one of the authors of Gremlins.js. Glad to see that some of you find it interesting.<p>I wrote a blog post a while ago about the purpose of the lib, it&#x27;s called &quot;Completing the JavaScript Test Stack&quot;. Worth reading if you wonder what this is all about.<p><a href="http://redotheweb.com/2014/01/07/completing-the-js-test-stack-introducing-greminsjs.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redotheweb.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;01&#x2F;07&#x2F;completing-the-js-test-stac...</a>

lol I&#x27;m gonna call this &quot;Twitch Plays the Internet&quot;

For Android: <a href="http://developer.android.com/tools/help/monkey.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.android.com&#x2F;tools&#x2F;help&#x2F;monkey.html</a>

The GIF in Github makes me think TwitchPlaysYourApplication.js would be a better name :)

That looks really cool, though I think it would have a hard time navigating past the first few menus, and could hit features that are only rarely meant to be touched (e.g. &quot;delete everything&quot;.) Perhaps a searching algorithm that intentionally tries to explore every menu and feature, navigate to them and then test them. Or intentionally tries things it knows are more likely to find bugs.

Now have this play the 2048 game.

So the person who named this is old enough to have seen (and liked) <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gremlins" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gremlins</a><p>I guess 40-something.

A similar library that I wrote: <a href="https://github.com/ianb/walkabout.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ianb&#x2F;walkabout.js</a>

Not to be confused with the Gremlin graph traversal language (<a href="https://github.com/tinkerpop/gremlin/wiki" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tinkerpop&#x2F;gremlin&#x2F;wiki</a>) or the JavaScript version of Gremlin.

I just give my laptop or iPad to 2 year old son and it does the same trick!