In a previous post, I talked in a closing comment about how some tool vendors are trying to piggyback on WatiN to promote their inferior tools. Well there have been a couple of comments on my blog since from SWEA evangelist, Alex at a Hotmail address.
SWEA is much better product than WATIN. It can save days on test development and maintenance. Any small UI change will require change in the WATIN scripts, but SWEA scripts are more resilient to the UI changes – the control binding is separated from the script code. WATIN is just thin wrapper around HTML DOM, but SWEA is complex automation framework.
You can also try SWExplorerAutomation (SWEA) from webiussoft. SWEA is not free but provides more functionality (Recorder, Data Extractors, internal support for AJAX, more resilient to UI changes scripts) than WATIN.
Ok first things first. This is my blog and not a public forum. If you want to advertise on my blog, you can pay for your adds via Google. It is for this reason that I have deleted these comments.
Let’s debunk these claims one at at time.
Claim #1 SWEA is much better product than WATIN.
Dictionary.com defines a product as “the totality of goods or services that a company makes available.” WatiN is free and not produced by a company. So I will concede that point SWEA is a better “product” than WatiN, simply because WatiN is not a product at all.
Claim #2 SWEA scripts are more resilient to the UI changes … any small UI change will require change in the WATIN scripts
Now that is complete BULLSHIT. Good script design and development practices have significantly more impact on how resilient a script is to UI changes than the underlying tool does. WatiN supports controls defined as .net regular expressions. Using WatiN Attributes in a control class, allows controls to be defined in a single location and called consistently regardless of how WatiN finds the control. Couple that with Visual Studio 2005’s refactoring support and I am working in UI change nirvana with WatiN. If anyone needs to know how good script design should be done, please feel free to follow my blog post series and learn how to do it properly.
Claim #3 SWEA is not free …
That one is true.
Claim #4 SWEA is not free but provides more functionality (Recorder, Data Extractors, internal support for AJAX …
You can get WatiNRecorder from here, so that is an outright lie.
I honestly don’t know what a “Data Extractor” is, nor why I would need one.
WatiN does support AJAX, and yes there are some issues, however they are well know and being improved every day, so that is another lie as well.
Claim #5 WATIN is just thin wrapper around HTML DOM, but SWEA is complex automation framework.
WatiN is a thin wrapper around Internet Explorer, not just the HTML DOM. One of the key reasons WatiN and Watir do so well are their elegance, simplicity and speed. I personally would not be quoting complexity as a feature or any application.
Honestly, SWEA may be an OK product, however if it was so good, webiussoft wouldn’t need to leave comments on every WatiN related blog post they can find, pleading for people to try their products instead.
I’ll leave the last word on this to a comment one one of my posts from Petey in regard to test tool companies that resort to blog spam marketing : “Don’t forget SWEA. It is so annoying!”
If that isn’t a great reason to not try a tool, I don’t know what is.