Željko Filipin, Jari Bakken and Simon Stewart

Željko Filipin talks with Jari Bakken and Simon Stewart about the connection between Webdriver and Watir 2.0 (currently named Watir-Webdriver on GitHub). Webdriver is a browser automation framework that is cross-platform, cross-browser and language independent; a project which Simon Stewart is the lead developer. It is becoming the core of Selenium.

The crucial piece of this, for Rubyists at least, is the selenium-webdriver gem (written by Jari Bakken) that brings the Ruby bindings to Webdriver. Add watir-webdriver (also written by Jari Bakken) on top of that and you have what people are calling watir 2.0, a watir style-api with a webdriver core.

Webdriver related projects mentioned:

• WebDriver and Selenium
• Selenium docs
• HtmlUnit

Jari Bakken’s projects:

• Celerity
• selenium-webdriver gem, docs
• watir-webdriver, see also differences between Watir 1.x and Watir-Webdriver gem (aka Watir 2.0)

Podcast Timeline:

• 00:00 – Jarib introduction
• 01:13 – Simon introduction
• 01:46 – Webdriver history
• 03:22 – What about Safari?
• 04:19 – Is Webdriver part of Selenium?
• 05:41 – How did Jari get involved with Webdriver?
• 07:16 – Ruby bindings for SeleniumWebdriver gem
• 07:45 – Remote Webdriver
• 09:30 – WebDriver and HTML Unit
• 11:04 – HTML Unit, Webdriver, Celerity – are they separate?
• 12:00 – Could you run Webdriver headless like Celerity?
• 13:39 – Does every Webdriver browser driver have a maintainer?
• 15:41 – Is ChromeDriver (by Sai) part of Webdriver?
• 16:52 – Jari comments on additions to Watir 1.6.5
• 18:41 – Status of Watir on Ruby 1.9
• 19:55 – Jari talks about Watir 2.0
• 22:15 – How complete is Watir 2.0?
• 23:33 – Watir Unit tests and WatirSpec
• 26:10 – How you can help with Webdriver
• 28:00 – How you the projects mentioned

Further reading after listening to the podcast: Alan Baird and Jari Bakken on watir-webdriver.