Selenium Overview

What is Selenium ?

Selenium is a software testing framework used for testing web applications.

• It provides support to write test scripts in many popular programming languages, including C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java etc.
• It also provides a great support in running the test scripts across multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux and Macintosh.

Mainly for these two reasons, Selenium is so popular in automation world.

Looking Inside Selenium

Selenium has many components that coalesce well to cook a wonderful automation testing system. Following are the components of Selenium :-

• Selenium IDE
• Selenium Remote Control
• Selenium WebDriver
• Selenium Grid

Selenium IDE :-  
Selenium IDE was originally created by Shinya Kasatani in 2006 and implemented as a Firefox add-on which helps to record, playback and debug selenium tests. It records tests in its special test scripting language called as Selenese. Following are the features supported by Selenium IDE :-

1. Record of tests and play them back.
2. Debug test cases by setting break-points.
3. Convert test cases to JUnit, Python, Ruby, C# or other formats.
4. Support for adding user extensions.
5. Locate web elements using IDs, XPaths etc.

Fig : Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE only works with Firefox. To run Selenium IDE tests across multiple browsers we need one server which will help IDE in doing that. Fortunately, we have one : Selenium Remote Control.

Selenium Remote Control :-

Selenium RC is a server which acts as a proxy between Application Under Test (AUT) and the test scripts.

It interacts with different browsers through the selenium core which is bundled with Selenium RC. It removes the need of installing selenium core on the web servers.

Fig : Selenium RC

Selenium Web Driver :-

Selenium web driver is the successor of the Selenium RC. Selenium Web Driver works in the same way users interacts with the web pages. In contrast to Selenium RC, it doesn't need a server to run. It directly starts a browser instance and controls it.

Selenium Grid :-

Selenium Grid is a server used to distribute tests on multiple machine so as to run tests in parallel. It cuts down the time required for running in-browser test suites.

Fig : Selenium Grid

Download Selenium from :- http://seleniumhq.org/download/

For study materials on Selenium :- 

1. http://seleniumhq.org/docs/
2. http://qtpselenium.com/selenium-tutorial/