I just spent a couple of hours installing Watir and thought I would pass along my experience in case the very talented developers want to make it easier for others in the future. The problem was not with the gem, it was with the environment.
First, the gem command can't seem to get through the proxy. I'm not (really, really not) a Windows person, so I wasn't sure how to fix this. I tried a couple of things I found online, like setting HTTP_PROXY, but no success. The Cygwin installer seems to be able to figure out the proxy settings, that would be a really useful addition to gem.
Second, there are lots of Cygwin packages needed by the various gems to allow them to build. Figuring them out was a bit aof a challenge in a couple of cases, some of the error messages are obscure.
I wound up iterating on downloading gems to install locally and installing Cygwin packages about a dozen times.
Suggestions on how to figure out the proxy setup on this Windows box and how to get gem to understand it would be welcome.
All of this is because I need to automate data collection from a website that hides some of what I need behind Javascript. The first version used Net::HTTP and worked just fine on a Linux VM, but didn't collect one bit of information I needed.
-- Matt
It's not what I know that counts.
It's what I can remember in time to use.