WATIR stands for “Web Application Testing in Ruby”. Watir is a free, open-source functional testing tool for automating browser-based tests of web applications. It is pronounced water.
I began experimenting with Watir over the weekend. I run a database-driven web site for a local non-profit group and have been looking for a good way to functionally test the site with a minimum time investment in a particular framework. I’ve had bad experiences with HtmlUnit and HttpUnit in the past and wanted a way to code the tests in Ruby. I’ve been told that the state of Watir a year ago was really awful, but apparently they’ve made lots of improvements since then because I didn’t have any trouble getting up and running.
As a test writer, most of your interaction with Watir takes placed through the IE object which lets you open a specific URL and then make assertions about what the page should look like. Watir’s flexibility in looking up data on the page is phenomenal. You can do lookups by name, ID, position, and so on. The pages I’ve tested thus far contain light JavaScript so I’m not sure how well Watir performs on pages with heavy scripting, but for my purposes Watir made it quick and easy to write tests that didn’t contain an enourmous amount of code, yet were powerful enough to thoroughly verify the functionality of my web app.
Couple Watir with ActiveRecord and you have a powerful way to verify that data on the backend is getting written and updated correctly from your web application.
I highly recommend you check out Watir for your next project. If you end up using it, feel free to share your thoughts about it by posting a comment here or e-mailing me directly. I’d enjoy hearing from you.