What smaller projects are contained in Watir projects?

About Watir

- Web application testing in Ruby often known as ‘watir’ belongs to the family of the open source family of tools for automation of the web browsers. 

- This tool is available under BSD license and consists of ruby libraries that can be used for automating the web browsers. 

- The tool possesses the ability for driving the web browsers such as Mozilla firefox, internet explorer, opera, safari and chrome. 

- Further, watir has been even made available in the form of RubyGems gem. 

- The credit for the primary development of this tool goes to Brett Pettichord and his colleague Paul Rogers.

Functionality of Watir

- The functionality of watir has been divided in to three main smaller projects. 

- Actually, watir consists of a number of smaller projects but we shall discuss the 3 major ones namely:

1. Watir – classic
2. Watir – webdriver
3. Watirspec

About Water–classic

- This project of watir is based on the fact that the OLE (i.e., object linking and embedding) capabilities come in – built with the ruby package.

- With such capabilities it becomes easy for watir–classic to drive the browsers pro-grammatically.

- One thing to be noted about the water – classic is that its way of operation is quite different from the way the other HTTP based test tools operate. 

- The other HTTP based testing tools operate via the simulation of the browsers. 

- The web browsers are directly driven by the water – classic using the OLE protocol. 

- The implementation of this protocol is done over the COM (component object model) architecture.

- Inter-process communication is possible due to COM such as in IE and ruby. 

- Further, dynamic object creation as well as manipulation is also possible with such architecture. 

- This is termed as OLE automation by Microsoft. 

- The manipulating program has been termed as the automation controller. 

- Technically this can be explained as follows: The internet explorer serves as the server and caters to the automation objects and exposes their methods. The ruby program then serves as the client that carries out the manipulation of the automation objects. Water – classic can be put in to the gemfile or can be installed manually.

About Water–webdriver

 

- This project has been developed as a modern version of selenium based water API. 

- The selenium 2.0 has been taken to be the reference implementation of the specification of the webdriver.

- Selenium 2.0 is the selenium webdriver. 

- Water API has been implemented as a wrapper around the selenium webdriver by Jari Bakken.

- The selenium 2.0 is what from which the water – webdriver has been derived and has been built up on the html specifications. 

- This implies that the water webdriver always maintain compatibility with the world wide web consortium specifications that already exist. 

- Webdriver is quite an elegant way for using webdriver with ruby. 

- Ruby 1.9.3 is perfectly supported by the watir – webdriver but nonetheless it works well with its old versions also. 

- When you start with watir ruby will take your commands and the spath selectors are absent here. 

- Even though the xpath selectors are supported by watir, its API is so awesome that the need for using the xpaths is totally eliminated. 

- Using watir web driver increases your efficiency as well as productivity. 

- In addition to this, the quality of the scripts execution increases by a thousand times.

About Watirspec

- This is the third major project of watir and can be considered to be its API’s executable specification such as ruby has rubyspec. 

- The performance of watir is better with watirspec and also improves the compliance with the watir – webdriver.