Recently I have asked if people are interested in creating Watir site at stackexchange.com. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people that are interested. Just today I have read that new stackexchange.com sites can be created, so I have created Watir site at stackexchange.com.

I think stackoverflow.com software (also used at stackexchange.com) is the best solution for Watir support (and almost any other kind of support).

If you think Watir site at stackexchange.com is a good idea, all you have to do is:

- go to Watir site at stackexchange.com
- click link “Follow It!”
- enter your e-mail
- click button “Submit”

(I was tempted to write this as a Watir script.)

Optionally, you can add on-topic and off-topic questions, and vote on other questions as on- or off-topic.

Feel free to spread the word on your Twitter/Facebook/blog…

If you want to learn more about stackexchange.com, read the FAQ.

Watir Podcast Logo

Numbers

A few days ago it was 2 years since I published the first Watir Podcast.

In this 2 years I have published 34 podcasts with people literally all over the world. Lately I am trying to produce a podcast a month, and I am trying to keep it about 30 minutes long. I have recorded podcasts as short as 5 minutes, but also longer than 70 minutes.

Google Analytics and FeedBurner say the numbers are (mostly) going up. FeedBurner says about 100 people is subscribed to the podcast feed lately.

Google Analytics

FeedBurner

The following table lists downloads since December 2009, when I started using Podtrac. The first number is total downloads, the second number is unique downloads. Please notice #26.

I am glad to see that podcasts as old as 1 or even 2 years are still downloaded.

Thank You

After two years, what to say? It was a lot of fun, I hope it will not end soon.

I would like to thank everybody that wanted to talk with me. I would probably stop recording podcast if I did not have a lot of help from Watir Podcast Team. A big thank you to all of you that co-hosted a podcast, contributed music and logo, worked on the web site, edited audio… I could not do it without you.

I would like to thank Bret Pettichord for agreeing to record the first podcast, Alan Baird that worked on the web site, and Gregg Yows that co-hosted a lot of times and contributed a lot of music.

I would probably give up a long time ago if Tiffany Fodor did not offer to edit the audio and create show notes. Tiffany, thank you.

Also, a bit thank you to every listener. Yes, you too. Well, if you were not listening, all this would not make a lot of sense.

If you have some time, and you would like to contribute to the podcast, please let me know. I need help with finding guests, co-hosting, I am always looking for music that can be published under a Creative Commons licence… If you would like to take over Watir Podcast, let me know. I would help you with everything. I have other stuff to do, but if nobody is interested, I will not let the podcast die.

I did not mention a lot of people by name, because this blog post would end up being too long. You know who you are. Yes, you. Thanks.

I found a link to Play Pacman with Selenium 2 blog post at Watir General Google group and I decided to try it with Watir.

The best score so far is 3150, but the best score recorded is 2280. Dave says he got to 2660 with Selenium.

The source is on github.com/zeljkofilipin/pacman. Feel free to fork.

My slides:

I took a photo or two:

My slides:

Video of my talk:

Željko Filipin – Web application testing Showoff from IT showoff on Vimeo.

I took a photo or two:

[14:29] <alan_baird> jarib: if you are still around I have a follow up webdriver question for you
[14:36] <jarib> alan_baird: shoot
[14:36] <alan_baird> ok
[14:36] <alan_baird> so, in the podcast, Simon says that Webdriver is built on top of html unit
[14:37] <alan_baird> is that correct?
[14:38] <jarib> it has several backends
[14:39] <jarib> htmlunit being one of them
[14:39] <jarib> in addition it drives IE, Firefox, Chrome, with support for Opera, iPhone and Android on the way
[14:39] <alan_baird> ok
[14:40] <jarib> was the podcast that confusing? ouch :/
[14:40] <alan_baird> so, it seems kind of analagous to what a JVM does for different operating systems?
[14:40] <jarib> i guess we ended up talking too much about HtmlUnit
[14:40] <alan_baird> well, I don’t know that it was all that confusing
[14:40] <jarib> you might say that
[14:40] <alan_baird> but, in trying to type up the show notes I’ve come up with my own questions
[14:41] <jarib> it gives you a common interface to the various browsers
[14:41] <alan_baird> ok
[14:41] <alan_baird> so, that common interface is written in Java right?
[14:41] <jarib> not really – there’s bindings in java, ruby, c# and python
[14:42] <jarib> the java and ruby bindings are the most complete
[14:42] <alan_baird> ok
[14:42] <alan_baird> i guess I’m not real familiar with the bindings concept, but I guess I can get the gist of it
[14:43] <alan_baird> but basically there is this thing at the core (webdriver) which can talk to the browsers natively
[14:43] <jarib> alan_baird: these slides may be helpful: http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dgpzbjs_33cxsxd9dd
[14:43] <jarib> check slide 11+
[14:44] <alan_baird> k
[14:44] <alan_baird> looking…
[14:44] <jarib> also slide 27 is telling
[14:44] <jarib> although the c# side is mostly complete as well now
[14:45] <jarib> alan_baird: there’s not really a “core” – webdriver speaks to each browser through the mechanism that fits that particular browser the best
[14:45] <jarib> so for firefox and chrome it’s through their extension system
[14:45] <jarib> for IE it’s C++
[14:46] <jarib> for opera (when it’s released) it’s using their scope protocol (which is also used by their built-in JS debugger)
[14:46] <jarib> etc.
[14:48] <alan_baird> seems like this webdriver.h is kind of at the core of all of this?
[14:48] <jarib> only for IE
[14:48] <alan_baird> ok
[14:49] <jarib> for FF, there’s a firefox extension, for example
[14:49] <alan_baird> so, when you wrote selenium-webdriver, you didn’t have to worry about all of the different browsers though did you?
[14:49] <alan_baird> (cause, that’s what webdriver’s supposed to do right?)
[14:50] <jarib> alan_baird: nope, i had to worry about them
[14:51] <alan_baird> hmm
[14:51] <alan_baird> well, how did having webdriver make things easier?
[14:52] <jarib> before i started, they had code that would bridge java->firefox extension, java->C++ IE driver, java->chrome extension etc.
[14:52] <alan_baird> (btw – I’m typing this in the middle of an ice storm, so if I suddenly disappear and don’t come back it’s probably cause the power went out)
[14:52] <jarib> so i basically ported the java parts to ruby
[14:52] <jarib> so now you also have ruby->firefox extension, ruby->C++ etc
[14:53] <alan_baird> ic
[14:53] <alan_baird> and that’s what selenium-webdriver is right?
[14:53] <jarib> it made it easier since i could reuse those browser-specific parts
[14:53] <jarib> yes
[14:54] <alan_baird> so, i looked at some of the examples in selenium-webdriver, would it be correct to say that that gem’s api follows selenium’s existing api?
[14:54] <jarib> how the “language bindings” talk to the browser still differs somewhat from browser to browser
[14:54] <jarib> alan_baird: it’s more correct to say the webdriver API
[14:54] <alan_baird> ok
[14:54] <jarib> although “webdriver API” =~ “selenium 2 api”
[14:54] <alan_baird> got it
[14:55] <jarib> however “webdriver API” != “selenium 1 api”
[14:55] <jarib> most people associate “selenium” with the selenium 1 api
[14:55] <alan_baird> cool…ok now how does webdriver remote come into the picture
[14:55] <alan_baird> is it required?
[14:55] <alan_baird> why would you use it?
[14:56] <jarib> the remote is basically two parts: a java web server, and a client driver
[14:57] <jarib> the server will accept commands like “click”, “findElement” (using a REST-like JSON-over-HTTP interface)
[14:57] <jarib> before they had java client->java server
[14:57] <jarib> now we also have a ruby client for that server, so ruby client->java server
[14:57] <jarib> does that make sense?
[14:58] <jarib> it’s not required, but it’s useful if you want to run your tests launch the browser on another machine
[14:58] <alan_baird> is that kind of the replacement for Selenium Grid?
[14:59] <jarib> say, if you’re developing on linux, you could easily run your tests on IE on windows, firefox on mac etc. using the remote driver
[14:59] <jarib> no, Selenium Grid is more than that
[14:59] <alan_baird> ok
[14:59] <jarib> but the webdriver remote stuff could be used to build a similar system
[14:59] <alan_baird> well, right now, I think I kind of have the same thign
[14:59] <alan_baird> i have a bunch of VMs that I execute tests on
[14:59] <alan_baird> and a system that tells the vms when to run the tests
[15:00] <alan_baird> but, it seems like the remote would be one computer telling the other computers what to do
[15:00] <alan_baird> as opposed to having it be independent the way I do it now
[15:00] <jarib> right – with the remote, you wouldn’t need to distribute your test scripts – each command to the browser would go over the network
[15:00] <jarib> so it’s a long-running server process
[15:01] <alan_baird> thats pretty nifty
[15:01] <alan_baird> is that the main way people would use that kind of feature for?
[15:02] <jarib> yeah – also makes it easier to test on various combinations of browsers/platforms
[15:03] <alan_baird> i’m just noticing the slide that says Webdriver has a “lovely API”, but apparently we didn’t consider it lovely enough so we made watir-webdriver
[15:03] <alan_baird>
[15:03] <jarib> haha
[15:04] <jarib> well, compare it to the selenium api
[15:04] <alan_baird> i guess that’s mainly so people could backport their watir tests without a major rewrite
[15:04] <jarib> yeah, for my part it’s mainly because we have a lot invested in the watir api
[15:04] <alan_baird> right
[15:04] <alan_baird> same here
[15:04] <alan_baird>
[15:05] <alan_baird> ok, well thank you very much for letting me bug you
[15:05] <jarib> if i were starting from scratch with experienced developers, i’d probably use the webdriver api directly
[15:05] <jarib> no problem
[15:05] <alan_baird> i’m going to forward this conversation to zeljko
[15:05] <jarib> yep
[15:05] <jarib> do that
[15:05] <alan_baird> maybe we might do a little follow up

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).

Update 1: as Steve suggested, I have tried it on RubyInstaller.

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

gem install watir-webdriver
gem install win32-process

Update 2: It works on Mac.

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

sudo gem install watir-webdriver

Update 3: It works on Ubuntu Linux.

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

Update 4: watir-webdriver is no longer prerelase gem, so installation is simpler.

Watir team had a little chat and we decided it would be a good idea to grow. So, one of the first duties I had as community manager was to promote two community members to support sheriffs.

I am glad I can announce that Tiffany Fodor and Wesley Chen have accepted to be added to Watir community team with title of support sheriff.

Tiffany answers a lot of questions and Wesley is helping us moderate the group. I hope both of them will continue with business as usual.

If you have a nice word for them, now is the time.

AWTA 2009 was a lot of fun. At Notes from AWTA 2009 you can find a lot of images, notes, podcasts, blog posts, presentations, twitter feed…

It was great to finally meet in person a lot of people I knew on-line for years. I have learned a lot how other people test. Also, Austin and Texas were very interesting to explore. I think all is already said about AWTA 2009. I just hope I will be there the next year too.

AWTA 2009 Sunday

Blogging again!

I had to travel a long way to get to AWTA 2009 in beautiful Austin, Texas.

To see what is going on, the best place is #awta Twitter channel.

I am twittering, posting images, blogging and podcasting like crazy.

AWTA 2009 Friday