Watir is an open source testing tool that I'm
involved with. It's written in
Ruby. It uses the OLE ( or
activex or com ) interface of Internet Explorer to access the DOM.
We are producing great results with it. Some users are doing things
with watir that they couldn't do with commercial tools. Watir Links:
Bret Pettichord is one of the
other main developers (although lots of people have contributed)
There are many things still left to do with
Watir. In no particular order, these are the things I'd like to see:
Multiple Browser support. It would be great to be able to run
Watir scripts against both Internet Explorer and FireFox. There are
2 ways we can do this at present. The first, and favoured by Bret,
is to use Selenium The
second is to use jssh Written by Alex Frite
Multi Platform support. Once Firefox (or mozilla) is supported,
Watir will work on most platforms. Steve
Gibson Already uses Linux. He runs Watir using wine on Linux.
Script Recorder. There's been lots of debate about this on the
Watir Mailing
list and the Agile-Testing
list. I personally favour the idea as a way of getting people to
undestand how the tool interacts with the web page. If you think a
script recorder is going to do the testing for you, please think
again. And again.
The Ugly Winclickers code. This needs to go away as soon as
possible. While it works, it's difficult to use. I'd like to see the
Ruby module Win32-GuiTest
come to life, and then the Watir project can use that.
What will Internet
Explorer 7 hold for Watir?