We've seen growing enthusiasm for Watir, a web-testing library that is good enough that it is convincing people to learn Ruby just so that they can use it. Here are some things people are saying about it:
Watir Rocks! I have played with it for only about on hour and accomplished what I had wanted to do (but did not have the wherewithall) for ages. Truly awesome !!
In my opinion, WATIR has no peer as a framework to drive functional test automation in Internet Explorer.
I have been using watir for a few weeks and have been very productive in automating the testing of our Web based application.
I downloaded Watir a few days ago, without having have any high hopes for it, but I have been very impressed by this tool. I have limited scripting experience and none with Ruby, but I was able to follow your examples and be productive in short order. My hat is off to all involved in this project, you're doing a great service for the testing community - mad props!
Up until now, I'd managed to avoid learning the Ruby scripting language.... But after seeing what Watir could do and how neat Ruby is, I became a convert.
See http://wtr.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?WatirTestimonials for more comments.
We've just release version 1.1 of Watir. http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=104&release_id=1782
I'm writing to ask for help. The biggest problem with Watir is its support for various dialogs. These dialogs appear when you use a browser; for example, a login dialog or a security dialog or a javascript dialog. Watir mostly works by accessing the DOM via IE's COM interface. But there is no COM/DOM interface to these dialogs. We have some code that uses Win32 API calls, but it is buggy and needs work. Frankly, i think we would be better off using a general Win32 GUI testing library than trying to build a peice of it ourselves.
Perl has a really good Win32-GuiTest library. http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/htdocs/Win32-GuiTest/
There is also a Ruby port of this, but it uses Cygwin and appears to have been abandoned.
http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/win32-guitest/
We need something that works with MSWIN. Can you help us?
So far we have had some suggestions. One person suggested that we just use the Perl library. Another has suggested that we use AutoIt. But personally i would prefer a Ruby solution. Surely i'm not the only Ruby programmer left on the Windows platform. Do we want to let the Perl programmers dominate Windows?
Bret
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Bret Pettichord
www.pettichord.com