in reply to Testing at the browser: a trip report. (Perl, Ruby, etc.)

Look to hear more about WATIR in the future. Unfortunately, it's not Perl, so that news won't be here-- but I suggest anyone interested in functional testing using IE as an interface check out WATIR.

How hard would it be to implement WATIR in Perl, based on Win32::OLE, say? Is there any intrinsic reason why Ruby is better suited to this task than Perl?

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Re^2: Testing at the browser: a trip report. (Perl, Ruby, etc.)
by McMahon (Chaplain) on Jan 12, 2005 at 15:37 UTC
    The critical techology in WATIR isn't the language in which it is written. The critical technology is the sophistication with which the framework is capable of manipulating the Document Object Model (DOM) in Internet Explorer.

    The WATIR people are doing an outstanding and elegant job of this in Ruby. There's no reason it couldn't be done in Perl, but no one has yet, at least at the level of elegance and sophistication demonstrated by WATIR.
[reply]
      The WATIR people are doing an outstanding and elegant job of this in Ruby. There's no reason it couldn't be done in Perl, but no one has yet, at least at the level of elegance and sophistication demonstrated by WATIR.

      Well, there is SAMIE and Win32::IE::Mechanize.

      Personally, I'm not as certain as you are that Ruby isn't a critical part of WATIR's success. From what I have seen people find it much easier to move from WAITIR to more general Ruby code than from Perl testing frameworks to more general Perl programming.

      Much as I love Perl it's been my experience that people find learning Ruby easier.

[reply]
      TRUE. I would like to have Win32:Watir :-))
[reply]

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