Watij: Brief progress report

I have been evaluating Watij lately and here are my conclusions so far for some automation features important to me:

IDE

Since I am from the QTP/VBScript world I still struggle a bit with the Java syntax and OO...furtunatly my IDE (IntelliJ IDEA) has very good refactoring features (and other develop-friendly features as well) so it is not necessary to make perfect code/structure from the start.

GUI test execution speed

Not as fast as QTP but very close. Since the source code is available I managed to change a hard-coded timeout property and I guess there are several others that you could tweek for faster performance.

Test object model

Quite simular to Descriptive programing in QTP.

QTP example: Browser("Google").Page("Google").WebEdit("q").Set "Watij"
Watij example: ie.textField(name,"q").set("Watij");

Have not explored all possibilities with dynamic test object handling in Watij yet but at least getting all links in a frame into an array was very simple.

Community

The QTP community is awesome and Watij's dito seems ok but rather small.

Pop-up handling

QTP is very good handling pop-ups but have a weakness running such actions in a locked workstation. Watij has so far also been very good at this (except for an authentication dialog which I handled with a quick and dirty java robot solution) and IT WORKS IN LOCKED MODE! This feature alone allows unattended GUI tests being run 24x7...This seems to good to be true so I will do some more testing on this using remote desktop -> server...