Update!

Instructions on this page are obsolete. Please find up to date detailed instructions for Windows, Mac and Linux in my watir book.

Jari Bakken just released Watir on WebDriver.

Windows

One-Click Installer (old)

On Windows, install it with

gem install watir-webdriver

and use it with

require "rubygems" # optional
require "watir-webdriver"
browser = Watir::Browser.new(:firefox)

Supported browsers are Internet Explorer (:ie, :internet_explorer), Firefox (:ff, :firefox), Chrome (:chrome) and RemoteWebDriver Server (:remote).

RubyInstaller

Install RubyInstaller, DevKit and all required gems and it just works!

gem install watir-webdriver

Mac

My Mac came with Ruby and RubyGems installed, so it was just:

sudo gem install watir-webdriver

Linux

Ubuntu

My Ubuntu did not have Ruby and RubyGems installed.

Install Ruby with:

sudo apt-get install ruby-full

You can install RubyGems with:

sudo apt-get install rubygems

but Jari said it would be better to install it from source. Downland the latest RubyGems tgz or zip file (rubygems-1.3.5.tgz and rubygems-1.3.5.zip at the moment), extract it, open Terminal in extracted folder and run:

sudo ruby setup.rb

Install watir-webdriver:

sudo gem1.8 install watir-webdriver

Fedora

Please see Installing Watir-Web Driver on Fedora Linux

Update: Steve suggested I should try the script also with RubyInstaller, and I did it.

This blog post is update of my recent Ruby Mail on CRuby, JRuby and IronRuby post. Mikel and Jimmy have commented on the post saying I did a poor job, and I would agree. I decided to do a better job this time. Please let me know if measurements can be further improved.

So, I have an e-mail file called 1.eml:

Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:37:34 Central European Standard Time
From: from@test.com
To: to@test.com
Message-ID: <4b336e9e762a0_a1014263a4689d3@2003-ie7.mail>
Subject: This is a test email
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="US-ASCII";
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Some text for mail body

The First Try

This is the test from the first post. (RubyInstaller was not included in the first post.) It is included here so all code and numbers are at the same page, I guess it is easier to compare that way. Read the file, display subject and total time elapsed (in seconds).

time = Time.now
require "rubygems"
require "mail"
mail = Mail.read("1.eml")
puts mail.subject.to_s
puts Time.now - time

Executed the script three times for each Ruby implementation. RubyInstaller the fastest, CRuby and JRuby were similar in speed, IronRuby was way slower.

The Second Try

Since both Mikel and Jimmy said require could take the majority of the time, and I was not really interested in measuring that, I excluded it from the measurement.

require "rubygems"
require "mail"

time = Time.now
mail = Mail.read("1.eml")
puts mail.subject.to_s
puts Time.now - time

Times were way shorter. RubyInstaller the fastest (can not get much faster that 0.0 seconds), CRuby and JRuby in the same order of magnitude, IronRuby order of magnitude slower. JRuby has surprisingly the same numbers every time.

Benchmark

Mikel and Jimmy have suggested that I should use benchmark.rb, so I took a look. I have slightly modified the script. This time the file was read 1000 times.

require "rubygems"
require "mail"
require "benchmark"

Benchmark.bm do |x|
  x.report { 1000.times do; puts Mail.read("1.eml").subject.to_s; end }
end

This measurement said JRuby was the fastest, followed closely by RubyInstaller and CRuby, IronRuby again order of magnitude slower.

Environment

Tests were run in VMware Fusion 2.0.6 virtual machine, 512 MB RAM, Microsoft Windows Sever 2003 R2 (Standard Edition, Service pack 2).
Host machine is MacBook Pro, 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X 10.6.2, 4 GB RAM.

>ruby -v
ruby 1.8.6 (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [i386-mswin32]

>jruby -v
jruby 1.4.0 (ruby 1.8.7 patchlevel 174) (2009-11-02 69fbfa3) (Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM 1.6.0_10) [x86-java]

>ir -v
IronRuby 0.9.3.0 on .NET 2.0.0.0

>ruby -v
ruby 1.8.6 (2009-08-04 patchlevel 383) [i386-mingw32]

Mail version 1.3.4 on all platforms.

Yesterday I spend a few hours trying to install Webalizer on Mac OS X 10.6 (Show Leopard), with no luck. After some browsing, I found instructions how to migrate MacPorts, but I got stuck with Error: Checksum (md5) mismatch for jpegsrc.v7.tar.gz. Looks like it is fixed, and Webalizer installed with no problems today with just:

sudo port install webalizer