This blog post is superb news for those working on automated testing of web applications. It's not so much the ability to automate Firefox itself that's making me drool for the 1.0. It's the cross-platform thing that's the real meat around the bones. The Firefox support is implemented through the JavaScript Shell Server which I blogged about last October and it's all cross-platform, the technology being Mozilla's own JavaScript-based XPI API and a simple telnet interface for the remote shell.

I happen to be working on a little something with Pamie for a client right now and I can only say that Watir is lightyears ahead of Pamie in terms of the API. For example, who could've guessed that someone names the API functions as something like "linkGet()" rather than, say, "getLink()"? The biggest problem is, however, the fact that there's zero, zilch, zip documentation for the Pamie API. And it's damn difficult to figure out which methods the COM objects respond to when you can't get at the information with "dir()".