I am an experienced scripter in both Mercury QTP and Watir, and I'd have to say that they are very comparable in functionality. At this time niether QTP nor Watir have the ability to do a whole lot easily with Firefox or other browsers, and QTP will never support Safari or linux based systems, which is something that Watir is striving for. One thing I like about Watir is that I get native control of the computer I'm running on, because it uses Ruby. With QTP you are limited to the QTP Environment, which in and of itself isn't too bad. Both QTP and Watir take a similar approach to testing in IE, except that QTP has the ability to use the mouse cursor to perform actions, and Watir at this time does not. This mouse cursor type testing though, is not necessarily invaluable, and can easily be programmed in languages that readily support it, like Java with the Robot api in AWT. Even without knowing that, there are likely other open source test suites that can provide you with this functionality.
You are correct is saying that once one moves out of the old (beginner level) recorder functionality of QTP, basically you have the same tools as in Watir. At this time my company uses both QTP and Watir, though we may easily one day completely switch over to Watir or similar tools. The reason behind that is that in our experience we have found the seemingly costly support that Mercury provides very unhelpful in our time of need, and by the time they get back to us generally we have found a way around our problem anyway. One disadvantage that Watir has at this time in comparison to QTP is its reporting mechanism. I have no experience with the Test Suite part of Watir yet, as we've been writing spiders and bots using Watir to test specific components of our website, but if you are using Ruby's built in Logger class to log information, then it is pretty much in raw format. I have thought of creating a program that parses that raw format and creates an HTML report based on it, and I have also thought of extending the Logger class to make my own format, as it hints to in the Ruby Core API documentation to do, but I haven't taken either path yet. So basically, both QTP and Watir do the same thing in the same way - don't let QTP fool you into thinking they can test IE better than any app around, because all they do is plug into the OLE server in IE. That's exactly what Watir does also. I don't know if this helps you any. Oh one more thing is that QTP gives you several options for scripting languages including VBScript and JavaScript, whereas Watir requires you to learn Ruby. But it really isn't very difficult (coming from a Jack - of - all - languages) to learn, and I think, as Ruby claims, it is a much cleaner language and has true OOP capability. If you'd like to know more about anything specific, respond to this, and maybe I can help out. thanks, Nathan --------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted via Jive Forums http://forums.openqa.org/thread.jspa?threadID=5110&messageID=14212#14212 _______________________________________________ Wtr-general mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general
