Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Installing Watir

I’m exploring Watir as part of my presentation I’m developing for next week’s DevGroup meeting

I ran into one hitch when trying to install Watir right after installing Ruby via the One-Click: you need to exit the Explorer and shell sessions you may have open, then restart them.  Do this in order to get the PATH environment variable updated — Watir has to find Ruby on the path or it dies out with a “windows installer error” and complains about not being able to write  “\watir\AutoltX.chm”.  Note the path — suspiciously like a web path, which keyed me into the idea about not being able to find the Ruby executable.

Am I one bright guy or what?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can also try SWExplorerAutomation (http://www.webunittesting.com)

The program creates an automation API for any Web application which uses HTML and DHTML and works with Microsoft Internet Explorer. The Web application becomes programmatically accessible from any .NET language.
SWEA API provides access to Web application controls and content. The API is generated using SWEA Visual Designer. SWEA Visual Designer helps create programmable objects from Web page content.

Jim Holmes said...

Sure, but SWExplorerAutomation costs money and is closed source.

Watir is open source and the price is right.

Anonymous said...

Time also costs money. SWEA is more mature product then Watir. It has better architecture and support more features. Try to access a frame from a different domain using Watir or try to work with Web site which uses AJAX - you will spend "free" hours doing this without success.

Jim Holmes said...

I'd be a lot more open to your tool if it wasn't fairly apparent via simple Google and Technorati searches that you're doing nothing more than pasting verbatim sales pitches on any blog hits for Watir.

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