Is there any progress in functional testing tools?

We are using Selenium for functional testing our AJAX application. Although Selenium has been a great help for us, it still suffers the same problem functional testing always suffered: tests maintenance overhead. We have quite a lot of Java code that isn't easy to maintain when software changes. I know that other 开发者_JS百科testing tools (like BadBoy an others) aren't very different in this respect. My question is: has there been any break-through in the functional testing industry recently? Or maybe there's an on-going promising research in this area?

One thing I know is that using page object pattern can reduce the level of maintenance for selenium tests.

keyword based test automation (Robot Framework)

Currently Selenium is one of the best tool available to Automate functional testing. But one must need to identify the potential use of any tool need to implement on any specific type of application. For AJAX based application if we use Selenium using Javascript language it would be better. Or we can use Selenoid (A replacement for Selenium as, it is easy to maintain) for AJAX based projects.