FireWatir release was like "freedom of soul". I needed something like watir to run on my linux system and firewatir solved that problem.
However, while working with firewatir, I found it to be very slow. Initially it was tough to figure out as to what could be the problem. From the code it seemed like there was lot of communication happening between firewatir and jssh server. eg. Say for accessing a textbox, firewatir will first ask the browser about the textbox element and then send the events. Similarly for each and every element user requests for, will make firewatir to talk with the browser. Keeping this in mind I created a sample code which deals with this issue. Its available for download from http://www.geocities.com/chesschintan/rufire.tgz The code first downloads whole html page and uses htmltokenizer to create various textboxes, buttons and other elements. This reduces a lot of overhead. Though it has one drawback. That is if after opening a page using ff.goto(), the user manually opens another page using firefox then the code would fail. However its a kinda very rare case.
Second noticable thing was the way firewatir implemented read_socket(). This seemed to be a major cause decreasing the performance. However while testing, jssh protocol was found to be kinda misbehaving. Simple socket.gets() or socket.recv() doesnt work. May be thatz the reason which tempted author to implement read_socket() in a reliable manner sacrificing bit of performance. But socket.sysread() is a beautiful socket method which worked for me.
After doing the above two changes code worked with charm even beating (watir) IE performance. Rufire supports only textbox, radio, buttons and checkbox elements. Its not a complete code. I made it just for the sake of testing with above two changes. You can copy test.html available in the .tgz to localhost webserver and test using test.rb file. Currently it lacks one feature of knowing whether hml page has been loaded in browser or not. Add a sleep statement with good value in Firefox.goto () just in case you wanna test it against a heavy website.
Thanks
Chintan
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