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Browser testing with Firewatir

I’ve been looking (and still am, but less) for a simple solution to test-drive website development with browser integration. Rob Westgeest pointed me to Firewatir. Firewatir is a Ruby wrapper around Firefox through the JSSH shell extension.

Firewatir is new and still under development, but looks promising to me, as it fullfills the four R’s: Easy to Read, (w)Rite, Run and Refactor. The only thing that is required is a firefox plugin for JSSH and a ruby library (installable through rubygems). Current downsides are scant documentation and the test process seems to hang sometimes. We also had to make some extensions to start Firefox automatically under linux (Firewatir was originally made for windows). The scant documentation you can get around if you read the tests.

We had a session on browser testing at Agile Open Europe this week. Apparently, links to Firewatir and its (scant) documentation are not that easy to find from some countries.

Hope this helps to make them easier to find. I’d be curious to know what you are going to use it for :)

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 11:12 am and is filed under testing, wrestling with programs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Browser testing with Firewatir”

  1. Eric Says:
    June 14th, 2007 at 12:00 pm

    Ooh! so, it’s firewatIr, not firewatEr! No wonder I couldn’t find it on Google…
    When typed correctly, it is actually the first link on google.fr.

  2. Willem van den Ende Says:
    June 14th, 2007 at 12:09 pm

    That’s the weakness of making a word joke of a product… (like Watir which is pronounced like Water in English…). In Dutch I would pronounce the ‘i’ much more…