A testbed (also commonly spelled as test bed in research publications) is a platform for experimentation of large development projects. Testbeds allow for rigorous, transparent, and replicable testing of scientific theories, computational tools, and new technologies.
The term is used across many disciplines to describe a development environment that is shielded from the hazards of testing in a live or production environment. It is a method of testing a particular module (function, class, or library) in an isolated fashion. May be implemented similar to a sandbox, but not necessarily for the purposes of security. A testbed is used as a proof of concept or when a new module is tested apart from the program/system it will later be added to. A skeleton framework is implemented around the module so that the module behaves as if already part of the larger program.
A typical testbed could include software, hardware, and networking components. In software development, the specified hardware and software environment can be set up as a testbed for the application under test. In this context, a testbed is also known as the test environment.
Testbeds are also pages on the Internet where the public is given the opportunity to test CSS or HTML they have created and want to preview the results.
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The Arena web browser was created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and CERN for testing HTML3, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Portable Network Graphics (PNG) and the libwww.[1][2] Arena was replaced by Amaya to test new web standards [3]
The Line Mode browser got a new function to interact with the libwww library as a sample and test application.[4]
The libwww was also created to test network protocols which are under development or to experiment with new protocols.[5]