WATIR, pronounced “Water”, is an acronym standing for “Web Application Testing in Ruby”. Watir is a toolkit used to automate browser-based tests during web application development. This automated test tool uses the Ruby scripting language to drive the Internet Explorer web browser, and is available as a Ruby Gem.
Examples
The google example
# Here we see a very simple WATIR script to drive to google and validate a page
require ‘watir’ # use watir gem
test_site = ‘http://www.google.com’ # set a variable
ie = Watir::IE.new # open the IE browser
ie.goto(test_site) # load url, go to site
ie.text_field(:name, “q”).set(“pickaxe”) # load text “pickaxe” into search field named “q”
ie.button(:name, “btnG”).click # “btnG” is the name of the
# Search button, click it
if ie.text.include?(“Programming Ruby”)
puts “Test Passed. Found the test string: ‘Programming Ruby’.”
else
puts “Test Failed! Could not find: ‘Programming Ruby’”
end
The previous commands can be executed in the Interactive Ruby Shell (irb), or in a Ruby IDE such as FreeRIDE that is installed when Ruby is installed with the once click installer.
