From: James Britt Date: 2005-08-30T22:40:57+09:00 Subject: Re: Watir attracts Ruby Newbies Bret Pettichord wrote: > Watir is rapidly attracting users. (We pronounce it 'water'.) > > Many of our users are new to Ruby and even new to object-oriented > languages. > > In fact, they can't tell where Watir ends and Ruby begins. Thus, they > end up asking lots of questions to the Watir mailing list > (wtr-general@rubyforge.org) that are really just Ruby questions. > > I gave a presentation of Watir's precursor at the Ruby Conference 2003 > in Austin. At that time, i said that we were using Ruby as our scripting > language because it was intuitive and easy to learn for non-programmers. > > But now they are wanting to read data from spreadsheets or csv files or > initialization files. Or they want to create libraries. Or they want > help with Test::Unit. > I've some Watir tools that I've been meaning to clean up and package nicely Real Soon Now, but have suspicions that it will never happen. I wanted to have non-Rubyists run some tests, but didn't want to have to coax them into installing Ruby. Or learning Ruby, for that matter. I sort of built up a DSL syntax as well, so that the test scripts were simpler than straight Ruby, too. I wrote an app that kicks off an instance of WEBrick, which looks into a /scripts dir for user-defined test scripts, and creates a default home page listing the available scripts, rendered by automagically launching the default browser. Clicking on a script link would run that script. Error/info messages would then be displayed on another page as scripts ran. The code was bundled up using rubyscript2exe and packaged into a a zip file so that one could just drop it someplace on a target machine, unzip it to get a set of permanent directories (where one could store new test scripts), and double-click the exe to run the script server. It never gained any traction at the contract place I was working at the time, but I use it all the time myself (though I don't bother bundling it with rubyscript2exe for myself). I don't think I really have time to follow another mailing list, but I'd like to turn this code over to someone on the Watir team if they think it useful. Suggestions? James Britt -- http://www.ruby-doc.org - The Ruby Documentation Site http://www.rubyxml.com - News, Articles, and Listings for Ruby & XML http://www.rubystuff.com - The Ruby Store for Ruby Stuff http://www.jamesbritt.com - Playing with Better Toys