Sunday 23 March 2014

Getting acquainted with Selenium

What is selenium?

Selenium - Selenium is a collection of open source tools used for web automation and hence mainly used for automation testing of web applications. That said use of selenium needn't be confined to automation testing alone. It can also be used to automate several of the tedious administrative or routine jobs involving web applications. Selenium essentially is a browser automation tool and one of its key features is that it can be run across different platforms involving various browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, etc.).

The most commonly used selenium tools are the selenium IDE, selenium RC and the selenium web driver. Each tool has a different approach for enabling web automation. Based on the user's requirement one can choose either of the tools. For someone who is not very experienced in a particular scripting or programming language it is highly recommended to start with selenium IDE before advancing on to the other tools.

 

What are the commonly used selenium tools?

Selenium IDE: Selenium IDE is the record and playback tool of selenium. Originally known as selenium recorder, it lets you design test cases without making use of a scripting language. Selenium IDE comes as a plugin for Mozilla Firefox web browser.

Selenium Remote Control: Selenium RC makes use of two components, the selenium server and the selenium API which together is used to drive the web browser for the test. The selenium client libraries provide the user with the capability to program his script in a language of his choice. The selenium API then converts these to selenese commands (the domain specific scripting language used by selenium) and sends them to the server. The server in turn uses JavaScript commands to drive the application under test (web application) on the specific browser.

01Intro_IDE

Selenium Web Driver: Selenium web driver was built to address the limitations of the selenium RC API. The web driver API is a more object oriented one than its predecessor. Unlike selenium RC which uses JavaScript to drive the browser actions from within it, web driver uses the specific browsers built in support for automation to drive the user interactions. One can make use of the web driver API to automate browsers without the help of the remote server used with RC.

Selenium Grid: Grid allows a user to run multiple browser instances on various remote machines and hence control these from one central point.

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