What Is Watir?
What Is Watir?
WATIR is an acronym for Web Application Testing In Ruby and is pronounced the same as the word ‘water’, it is a simple and flexible tool. It is an open-source family of Ruby libraries for automating web browser testing, and the Watir WebDriver (the modern version of the Selenium based Watir API), it drives/supports Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari browsers. It is a simple and flexible tool and facilitates the writing of automated tests which are easy to both read and maintain.
It interacts with a browser the same way a person or a manual tester would do, in effect it mimics a real person, it logs in, clicks on links, fills in forms, validates text and so on.
It also runs in headless mode (HTMLUnit).
What Is Watir Selenium?
The Watir testing an open-source web application testing framework and is designed to make writing Selenium tests simple and efficient. It is built on Selenium's Ruby language bindings and (as mentioned earlier) is designed to ‘drive the browser’ in the same way that a manual tester or a real user would. With all the features that Selenium has to offer, Watir Selenium can be described as awesome.
How to Set Watir Up?
If you are new to Watir, and you would like to set watir up from scratch, you have come to the right place:-
Install Selenium, next install a few necessary Selenium Libraries using Gem (gem install selenium-webdriver). Then install Watir (gem install watir-webdriver). Next install Rest-Client (gem install rest-client), then install Test-Unit, then finally use Test-Unit to carry out functional unit tests on the platform.
What Is the Difference Between Selenium vs Watir?
Selenium can be described as "Web Browser Automation"; it automates browsers. It is primarily for automating web applications for testing purposes, but will do other things as well, e.g. web-based administration tasks can be automated. In comparison, Watir is sometimes described as "Selenium abstraction in ruby". It is pronounced water, is an open-source (BSD- the name comes from Berkeley Software Distribution) and uses Ruby libraries to automate web browsers. Because of Ruby, tests are easy to write and they are easy to read and maintain.
A Brief History of Watir?
In 2001 Chris Morris wrote Ruby code to control Internet Explorer through its COM interface, the called it cliec. In 2003 Bret Pettichord and Brian Marick began using this code in a course they were teaching. Inspired by this course, Paul Rogers created his own library and called it Web Testing in Ruby
In 2004, Paul and Bret took the best parts of Web Testing In Ruby and cliec and created a cleaner API using TDD principles; this was WATIR.
What Is Watir-classic?
Watir-classic directly drives the browser through the Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) protocol which makes it a useful tool. It uses the fact that Ruby has built in (OLE) capabilities. Because of this it is possible to drive Internet Explorer programmatically.
Watir-classic operates differently than HTTP based test tools, and it directly drives the browser through the OLE protocol, which is implemented over the Component Object Model (COM) architecture.
What Is Appium?
Appium is a freely distributed opensource mobile application UI Testing framework; an ecosystem of tools and libraries. It allows native, hybrid and web application testing and supports automation tests on physical devices as well as an emulator, simulator or both. It provides cross-platform application testing, i.e., a single API works for both Android and iOS platform test scripts. Platform examples are android, iOS, desktop apps (Windows, Mac) and now on platforms like Smart TV and much more.
It supports all languages that have Selenium client libraries; examples are Java, Objective-C, JavaScript with node.js PHP, Ruby, Python, c#, etc. This means users can often use the programming language they are happier/more comfortable with when writing automated scripts/test codes. It was originally developed by Dan Cuellar in 2011, using the programming language C#, and called "iOS Auto". It is now developed and supported by Sauce Labs and can be summarised as a Cross–Platform Mobile Automation Tool.
What Is Automated Testing?
Automated Testing is the testing of products created by software developers to deliver bug free software and applications using automation tools such as Selenium, Mocha and others listed on our website. The use of these tools makes the entire process faster and more efficient testing is built to support Quality Analysts. Automated testing supports Quality Analysts and is a process in which software tools execute pre-scripted tests on a software application. The purpose is to define repetitive tasks and create or modify a test automation framework allowing constant test execution, reporting and comparisons, saving time and money.
What Is Cucumber?
Cucumber is an open-source software testing tool written in Ruby; it supports Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). It offers a way to write tests that anybody can understand, regardless of their technical expertise. In BDD, users first write scenarios or acceptance tests that describe the behaviour of the system from the customer’s viewpoint, these are reviewed and signed off before developers write their codes. It allows automation of functional validation in easily readable and understandable format (like in simple English) which is useful for developers, testers, clients/customers etc.
