Back to Blog

What’s New in LoadRunner 11.5

HP has officially announced the release of Loadrunner 11.5, and with it come a bevy of changes. The most immediately noticeable of these is a major retooling of the look and feel of VuGen.

Over the coming days, we’ll be breaking down and reviewing some of these changes in a couple of blog postings. Here is an overview of some of the major changes you can expect:

  • New and Improved VuGen – The whole look and feel of VuGen has been revamped here to include much more modular panes and viewing ability. While there are a handful of default views available, these are easily modified to taste. Tree view has been replaced with the new step navigator and the new solutions explorer gives access to all actions, run time and parameter panels.
  • Ajax TruClient Firefox Enhancements – Changes here include a move to Firefox 8 and support for HTML5. Functions can be created for easy reuse and event handlers are available to support asynchronous behaviors. I think the HTML5 is a significant advancement. We’ve actually seen a demo from HP of a Vugen script playing back a game Angry Birds.
  • Ajax Truclient Internet Explorer – A new addition to the Ajax TruClient family, HP is establishing TruClient as a cross browser solution for capturing heavy AJAX front went applications. Now companies who created their application with Internet Explorer support only can find bugs under load that they would not have simply because Firefox may run different code. Applications must work in IE9 standard mode to be supported.
  • Web Protocol Asynchronous Support – the Web (HTTP/HTML) as well as Flex, Silverlight and Web Services have been modified to support advanced applications that make use of asynchronous communications such as Poll, Long Poll and Push. This means applications such as chat, messaging, stock tickers, and news updates that use various asynchronous mechanisms should be easier to script against.
  • Improved Correlations – Correlations can now be found based on server responses during recording, so you don’t always have to play it back at least one to start correlation. Coupled with the new Correlation Studio interface, introduced in LR 11 which gives us regular expressions and XPATH, scripting becomes easier and faster.
  • Flex Enhancements – Improvements here include use of Web Correlation mechanisms, support for Web requests and the bundling of Adobe Flex platform jars into the application. In addition, there is now support for RTMP FMS streaming, RTMPT, RTMPS and GraniteDS.
  • Mobile Protocols– Initially introduced in FP4 of LoadRunner 11, these protocols enabe script development for http-based and native mobile applications. Traffic based analysis is used for native applications and Ajax TruClient technology is used for browser based mobile applications.
  • Data Format Extension (DFE) for Google Web Toolkit (GWT) – In addition to the already supported formats of Base64, JSON, URLEncoding, XML and Prefix-Postfix, support is now included for Google Web Toolkit (GWT). This includes: Formatting the GWT RPC data into readable and correlate-able content, addition of more data such as object field names and simple parameterization.

Additional important updates for support include 64-bit recording in Vugen (very important), .NET 4.0 support, WCF application support enhancements, and IPV6 support. A little late to the party, but welcome.

Keep checking our blogs for deeper dives into these changes. For now, take a look at these images from the new VuGen layout. Please post your feedback and questions below.

LoadRunner 11.5 VuGen Layout

LoadRunner 11.5 VuGen Layout

Back to Blog