As web applications become more complex, the testing time increases, yet frequent builds require more frequent testing. To overcome this, automation must be used. While commercial gui automation tools for web browsers do exist, they are expensive. Non-browser protocol testers ( such as httpUnit) rarely test client side javascript.

To overcome this, the watir (Web Application Testing in Ruby) toolkit has been developed.

This toolkit, which is open source, allows almost all normal interactions with a web browser to be entered into a script, and then executed against the application under test. This tutorial will offer a brief introduction to the ruby scripting language, follwed by a demonstration of the watir toolkit.