Hi Jesse,
On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 6:42 PM, Jesse <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello! I'm using Ruby and Watir to automatically look up some data > about court decisions from an online database. The site doesn't play > nice with the common solutions for non-interactively accessing sites > (like Mechanize) so I turned to Watir. My code doesn't have anything > proprietary, but it won't do much for you unless you have a > subscription to LexisNexis Academic - anyway, here's the code: > http://pastebin.com/me3a3041 > > So this mostly works as advertised but I've had a couple problems. > Incidentally, I'm doing this on both OS X 10.6 and Windows XP, with > Ruby 1.8.7 and RubyGems 1.3.5. > > Ruby 1.8.7 on Windows? The recommended version to use for now is 1.8.6 26 from the one click installer http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/29263/ruby186-26.exe This won't require you to build required dependencies as you mention below. Some of the win32 libraries that we depend on have precompiled libraries for this version of Ruby built with msvc6 (mswin32), which automatically get picked up instead of built. The other option is rather experimental but uses the new release candidate of the Windows Ruby installer. Available on the same page on rubyforge, you'd need both the installer for the 186 version and the devkit for the same. Dig in if you want, I've been doing some playing around with it and need to spend more time sussing out what issues there may be and writing up instructions since it is going to replace the current one click as the de facto standard fairly soon. > 1) I can't seem to install Watir. On Windows, running 'gem install > watir' gives the following errors: > Building native extensions. This could take a while... > ERROR: Error installing watir: > ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. > > C:/Ruby/bin/ruby.exe extconf.rb > checking for strncpy_s()... no > creating Makefile > > make > 'make' is not recognized as an internal or external command, > operable program or batch file. > > I understand that this is because the computers I'm trying to install > on don't have the appropriate compiler or the 'make' program. And I'm > guessing this is an issue because Watir needs to use the Win32 IDE in > order to control Internet Explorer. But is there any way to install > Watir and not have to worry about this stuff? I'm trying to make this > script for a user who's not so computer-savvy, and he won't know what > to do with compilers and cygwin and all that fun stuff. I found some > binary versions of older Watir versions online, but they've proven to > be useless - even breaking my copy of Ruby, presumably because I > wasn't installing them right. > > 2) I'm experiencing severe slowdown with FireWatir, getting worse and > worse as a session goes on. Basically, my program is intended to look > up thousands of strings from a search engine. But performance seems to > get worse every time - by the 20th pass, the thing is taking around > two seconds longer to retrieve the data (including entering a string > into a search box, waiting for the search to come back, and running > some regexes on the returned page to get the needed data). From a > little testing my suspicion is that this is a known problem, as > indicated by this posting: > http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/wtr-development/2007-November/000669.html > > I've worked around it by just relaunching Firefox every 20 trials or > so, which seems to take care of the problem. Any ideas for another > solution to the slowdown issue? This is reproducible with OS X 10.6 > running Firefox 3.5.6, and with Windows XP running Firefox 3.0.16 (the > newest version didn't seem to work), both being controlled by > FireWatir 1.6.5. > Not sure why the slowdown, possibly Angrez can comment on this. There certainly seem to be some cases where the jssh plugin is generally slow as you mentioned, though we've not narrowed that down. > > Jesse > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Watir General" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > Before posting, please read the following guidelines: > http://wiki.openqa.org/display/WTR/Support > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/watir-general -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Watir General" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] Before posting, please read the following guidelines: http://wiki.openqa.org/display/WTR/Support To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/watir-general
