I have recently switched from a very successful (albeit IE 6-8 only) Watir suite to watir-webdriver (WW). It has been very painful and disillusioning but i'm getting close to back where I was 3 weeks ago.
Of course my reason was to be able to test all the browsers under (almost) the same code with the expectation that there would be a few places like ULing/DLing files that I may have to use some case statements on OS or browser flavor. I had been on ruby 1.8.6 and had to install 1.8.7 which involved getting rvm or pik (maybe wasn't necessary but seemed the easiest path). installing WW and getting to bring up a window was pretty simple, but what I meant by disillusioning was 1-finding out it didn't support Safari, which was apparently a bad assumption (clearly I thought it a safe one), and 2- having to account for WW's seeming inability to discern when the browser was loaded. This was one of my favorite things about Watir was it's (in my experience) reliable reliance on IE to determine that the page was fully loaded. No more wait statements! Well, with WW you're going to have to wrap your calls with wait methods, and if you wrote a lot of bare click/set/select statments you'll be doing a lot of wrapping (or overriding of lib methods to include wrapping in wait stmts). I don't regret moving to WW, but it did suck, and it does frustrate me about the wait, and it's way, WAY slower than watir (hopefully some refactoring will help this). On Aug 4, 12:40 pm, qalady <[email protected]> wrote: > Thank you very much for the feedback. > > So, to summarize what I think I am hearing: > > 1. Webdriver does not support Safari > 2. Webdriver does support mobile browser testing - but just barely > (as .click is not even working well at this point) > 3. WatirSafari "works" but has been out of development for at least a > year. It's not really clear on where > or how it will start to break down. > > I did look up web browser statistics on W3C site: > (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp) > and it looks like Safari is only around 3% of all browser users which > is just slightly above Opera. I was surprised the usage stats were so > low. > > So...now what...? I've spent the last few days thinking that as much > as I didn't want to switch to Selenium, that switching just might be > the responsible thing to do for my company. I've been reading/ > researching more about Selenium and how to get started. I have some > useful resources now...but I am worried about the "ramp up time". I am > only considering Selenium RC (not the ide). With Watir, I can > continue writing scripts today. With Selenium, it will be slow going > to set up the environment, and learning how to structure the test data > (page objects), read all the preliminary material and then sheepishly > start to write my first test scripts (I would work in Java). It seems > painful, but if in the end, it's going to be a better investment, > better go ahead and jump in now, right? > > Can anyone tell me something that would stop me from pursuing Selenium > and keep me feeling confident about having chosen Watir? (Please!) Is > there anything that Watir can do that Selenium can't? At this point, > even though I'm a personal fan of Watir and adore (and depend) on the > community that comes with it...I'm feeling like Watir is starting to > fall behind and Selenium is starting to become the more dominant tool > choice. As much as I personally want to select Watir as the tool of > choice for my company...it seems to not hold up against Selenium when > I discuss this with management. (Most other groups within the company > are using some combination of tools that include Selenium) > > Hoping to hear a reason to stay with Watir for my work project, > Lauren -- Before posting, please read http://watir.com/support. In short: search before you ask, be nice. [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/watir-general [email protected]
