WatirGrid just passed 3,400 downloads. Help it get to 4,000 downloads in June 2011 and Altentee will donate a flock of 10 sheep to a respectable cause.

1.1.3 has been released which includes the following changes:

• Improved command line –help and more simple instructions in the Readme. There’s also a mention at watir.com/frameworks
• Deprecated support for -b flag on provider where you used to specify a browser.
  Now just specify -d DRIVER flag to specify which driver you want to provide (watir, firewatir, safariwatir, webdriver or selenium)
• Updated basic cucumber examples
• .control and .iterate methods to yield browser objects so you don’t need to mess around with threads. Your test cases can start looking more like normal Watir code rather than a jungle of threads and remote DRb objects.
• Put the code base on a diet with 400+ lines deleted, and cut out a lot of extraneous ‘features’

On that last point, I’ve decided to keep WatirGrid as slim as possible. This means you won’t see development of extraneous features like grid management tasks such as starting/stopping VMs, killing browser processes and the like. For full fledged ‘grid management’ you should of course check out Gridinit or Selenium Grid.

Gridinit is also getting some complimentary changes. Things to look out for in June include:

• BYOG – bring your own grid, will let you use your own EC2 account, radically reducing costs and making Gridinit one of the most cost effective solutions out there.
• Zombies – currently working on a remote WebDriver server implementation using Node.js and Zombie.js for insanely fast headless browsers. This means you’ll get much more bang for your buck from a single core, and overcome many of the JavaScript woes that affect other headless solutions like HtmlUnit. Zombies will also be available for WatirGrid.