I am now using WaTiR with Rwdtinker using RubyWebDialogs. WatiR is Web Testing with Ruby. It drives IE through COM and DOM to push buttons, click links and verify that text is on result pages.
I have started testing rwdtinker http://rubyforge.org/projects/rwdapplications/
rwdtinker applications are small Ruby applications built to use RubyWebDialogs
I started under windows XP sp2 with watir.tar.gz dated Dec 22, 2004. I was impressed that every button dialog box and clickable link in the application was testable with WaTiR.
I do not use XP at home developing with Ruby. I decided to try to get WaTir working under Wine on Linux. I use Debian unstable with compiled kernel 2.6.9. I had an old version of crossover office installed. (version 2.1). Nothing worked. I kept installing IE over and over again. I tried Debian unstable version of Wine. I tried 20041212 version of Wine. The errors mostly were com errors related to starting IE. Could not find the registry key {0002DF01-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}. I opened regedit under wine to try to trouble shoot.
Finally to make the story of a long day, short, I installed the free demo version of a new crossover office. install-crossover-standard-demo-4.1.sh Using ruby 1.8.2 (2004-11-06) [i386-mswin32] Watir is working like a charm under Linux!
I am building test suites for all my rwdtinker applications.