Java (how and why I got started)

I'm a tester now, but I'm the only tester on the team with any programming knowledge. I've written some nice VBA to make our testing easier, but we were looking to migrate from using Excel to write and record manual test scripts to a proper dedicated testing tool.

The proper tool didn't report stuff in the way we wanted. It also didn't have an easy way to migrate our Excel scripts. Fortunately it did have an API that would allow us to access the metrics in the way that we needed and be able to take a lot of the drudgery out of migrating the scripts.

So I got stuck in. My first choice was Python. There were some examples on the vendor's website. I gave up fairly quickly though. The API was provided as a WSDL XML file, but the Python based WSDL gubbins just didn't work. I briefly looked at hand coding each message, but briefly was nought to know it would be too difficult / take too long.

Second choice was Java. I didn't have a budget for Visual Studio, and all the developers where I work use Eclipse anyway, so I figure I could get some help. In the end I didn't need their help, though I did get some pointers via email from a friend. By far the best help was from some online video tutorials. That got me up to speed pretty quickly.