We’re a few weeks late to the story, but we think it’s still important to call attention to: Watir and Selenium are joining forces. For those unfamiliar with Watir or Selenium, both of them are open source browser automation frameworks. For years they have been “competing” in the open source community, with Watir winning favor among the Ruby community and those who needed strong IE support, while Selenium won favor among the Java and C# crowds and those who really valued cross-browser support.
While both projects had their pluses and minuses, it’s great to see them finally working together. On behalf of BrowserMob (which builds on top of Selenium) and as a Selenium contributor, it pleases me to no end to know that the Selenium community will now gain two huge contributions: a first-class Ruby API and all the benefits of Watir’s fantastic IE support.
Note: this is not a merger. Watir will continue to run as an independent project and it will even still work with it’s own browser backend. The important thing here is that Watir will now offer an option to wrap around Selenium WebDriver, the core cross-browser automation library that all the other Selenium projects also wrap around. This means that while the projects will remain independent there will likely be a lot more cooperation moving forward.
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