Good information. You and Charley and maybe some others should put this in blogs so the wider world can find it.
On 5/4/07, Bret Pettichord <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I've been doing a lot of thinking and planning for what we need to do > with Watir. I've also been fairly quiet. I now have a new job and have > been preoccupied by the change in jobs lately: with wrapping up > affairs at my old job at DataCert, with a job search, and then with > starting at Dovetail, where they had built up a bit of a backlog of > work for me which I've finally dug out from. > > Dovetail has made a big commitment to Watir: to using it to test our > software, to supporting enhancements that we will be using, and even > to giving me time to attend to the necessary affairs in running an > open-source project. In fact, Dovetail intends to ship our testing > framework and our tests themselves to our customers. This means that > our tests will need to be good: be easy to understand, extend, run and > interpret. I am very excited by the opportunity. > > Watir 1.5 is getting very close to being "done." As soon as it looks > like we've fixed all the serious compatability bugs with Watir 1.4, we > will be posting the 1.5 gem to Rubyforge. This means that it will > become the default gem that will be installed when you do a "gem > install watir". Originally I wanted to wait until we got the > documentation for 1.5 updated, but now now i think that can wait for a > later point release (say 1.5.3). Charley tells me that many of the > questions on the wtr-general list regard problems that would be solved > by moving to 1.5, so it really will help to move there. > > By the way, Charley has also been rather busy lately, partly because > people keep hiring his Watir testers away from him. So if you are one > of these people, stop it. It only hurts Watir, in the end, by forcing > him to spend all his time on his day job. > > Jeff Fry is threatening to help out with the Rdoc and Zeljko has > agreed to take the lead with updating the users guide. Please > cooperate with any requests that they make. > > Many of you have noticed that FireWatir is looking very good. > SafariWatir is also looking good. The number one goal that I have for > Watir is pull together these different forks of Watir. In my view they > should all be part of one library, or perhaps each will be a plug in > to a standard library, much as, say the Ruby DBI library supports plug > ins for each of the different types of databases. In our case, we'd > have separate plug ins for each browser. This means supporting > multiple browsers and making Watir work on multiple platforms. The > importance and complexity of this goal is part of what is urging me to > wrap up Watir 1.5. > > We are targeting Watir 2.0 to include plugins for each of the main > browsers. I also plan to continue working on a Selenium plugin to > Watir. This would allow existing Watir tests to run tests using any > browser when connecting to a Selenium-enabled server. This, like all > the browsers, will be optional; so if Selenium scares you, you will be > able to continue to use Watir the old-fashioned way. > > In preparation for this, Watir 1.6 will begin the restructuring of the > existing code base to support plugins and remove the code duplication > that currently exists in the different forks. This will require > reorganizing the code files, and therefore we will want to merge all > patches before this reorg starts. We will also be taking this > occassion to make many changes to Watir that we've been considering > for some time, but have put off because of concerns about backwards > compatibility. We have attempted to make upgrading from 1.4 to 1.5 > extremely easy. Upgrading to 1.6 will be more difficult. In > particular, we will be converting Watir to use zero-based indexing in > 1.6. > > Another key element to getting Watir 1.5 out is updating our > website. We will be publishing a new, detailed, multi-page website aimed > at our general user community. This website will be hosted at > wtr.rubyforge.org and will include current information about the > various releases and how to install them and where the mailing lists > are. And we'll be keeping it up to date, as we move forward with this > plan. We will continue to use the wiki at OpenQA for the active user > community and there will be several links from the general website > into the wiki. We have had a lot trouble keeping the various pages on > the OpenQA website updated and accurate and will be replacing them > with pointers either to the website or to the wiki. I realize that the > current arrangement is very confusing and appreciate your patience. > > The Jira roadmap more or less lays out the next few steps in our > plan. We will be updating it shortly to better match up to the plan I > lay out here. If you have bugs you want fixed or features you want > added, please make sure there is an open Jira ticket for them. > > Bret > _______________________________________________ > Wtr-general mailing list > Wtr-general@rubyforge.org > http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general > _______________________________________________ Wtr-general mailing list Wtr-general@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general
