How do you test web applications? You can use Selenium, but Selenium is very heavy.
I tried wget.
To find out what exactly to send to the app, I started Firebug inside Firefox, went to the “Network” section and recorded what I would do, to see, whether the application works. Then I took the accessed URLs together with the parameters and first tried to send them manually from the command line. Observe, that Firebug lets you copy the exact POST/GET parameter as was sent by the browser, when you right click on the POST/GET command in the Firebug Network log. Once I managed to redo all the steps manuall from the commandline I transferred what I did into a script and edited it until it was nice and would run through:
$ history > test_my_web_app
test_my_web_app now looks as follows: