Curiosity got the better of me yesterday when writing about using SciTE, so I did a quick twitter survey to see what other people actually use. I got 13 responses within hours, and they show that there really is no common IDE for Watir.
The complete list of 13 responses:
- Aptana: 1
- Arachno: 1
- eclipse-galileo: 1
- NetBeans: 1
- notepad++: 2
- SCiTE: 4
- TextMate: 1
- vim: 2
I wonder if Textmate usage will go up over time as people get used to that fact that with recent versions of Watir, Safariwatir, Firewatir, etc. it’s much easier to run Watir scripts against Mac browsers?
It probably will. I have never used it so I don’t really know. I am not a ‘mac person’ :)
iTest2, demoed at the pre-Agile2009 meeting of the Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools Program (the day of your survey). Here are comments from Mike Longin, a presenter at Agile 2009 conference.
“iTest2 (http://itest2.com/) was also shown off and really goes a long way in my mind to show off the cababilities of an IDE for functional testing tools. As the project lead for SWAT, one of my biggest pushes has been to take the tools I get in Visual Studios and bring them to the functional testing world. At least for Watir, iTest2 is there.”
Link: http://devxero.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/aa-ftt-meetup-in-chicago-an-overview/
Although its web site has a screenshot of Mac version, but not released yet.
I use Intellij, which isn’t listed here. I work in a Java shop so already have licenses for Intellij…we use RSpec for our tests, and Intellij has a super-slick Ruby/RSpec/Rake environment. It supports code completion, a structure view for tests, a graphical test runner, and an IRB window inside the IDE. If you are in a Java shop and use Ruby, check it out.
I use Programmers Notepad (http://www.pnotepad.org), mainly because it was written by someone that worked at my current company!
Thanks, I will check it out.
I flick between Netbeans and Scite, depending on what I’m doing and where I am.
There’s nothing wrong with using SciTE, particularly since its main developer is a fellow Australian. However another very interesting editor, which is similar to SciTE but has some great features, is Code Browser, located at http://tibleiz.net/code-browser/.
Thanks Russell, I will check it out.
I find RubyMine to be a very good IDE for developing Watir tests
I used Scite and Notepad++ and found Notepad++ much better…
Running the script from the command line is the best way I suppose in order to analyze the output
e.g.
D:\myfolder>ruby mywatirscript.rb
I use SCITE just because I am lazy. And IRB too. But I noticed that the new installations of Ruby do not have SCITE included in them.
It’s just nice to run from the IDE and I don’t have to spend time figuring out SCITE.
Dave