Introduction To Selenium

Selenium:

Selenium is an open source Test Automation Framework which is widely used for Web Application. Selenium is built using JavaScript and can work on any browser that supports Java Script. It also provides a Domain Specific Language called Selenese which can be used to write tests in programming languages like Java, C#, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby & Java Script.

Brief History of Selenium:

Selenium was originally developed by Jason Huggins as an internal tool in the year 2004 for ThoughtWorks. Later Huggins and Paul Hammant along with the other programmers and testers in ThoughtWorks formed a team and were able to come up with the tool called “Selenium Remote Control (RC)”.

Huggins joined Google in the year 2007. Along with Jennifer Bevan and others, he continued working towards stabilizing Selenium RC.

Meanwhile Simon Stewarts from Thought Works had developed a Browser Automation Tool and named it as “Web Driver”. These were later merged into a Project called “Selenium Web Driver” aka Selenium 2.0 in 2009.

Philippe Hanrigou from ThoughtWorks developed Selenium Grid in 2008, which allows running of multiples Selenium Tests concurrently on any number of local or remote machines minimizing the Test Execution time.

Have you ever wondered how and from where the word “Selenium” came from? Well it was from a joke made by Huggins in one of his email mocking the competitor “Mercury”, saying that you can cure Mercury by taking Selenium supplements.

Selenium Components / Tool Suite:

Selenium is a combination of multiple tools.

Selenium 2 or Selenium Web Driver:

This is the latest addition to the Selenium toolkit. Selenium WebDriver has been widely used for automating web application due to its neat and clean object-oriented design. Selenium WebDriver can be integrated with other tools to develop automated tests. I shall provide insight on the same in my upcoming articles.

Selenium Remote Control aka Selenium 1.0

Selenium Remote Control (RC) is a server, written in Java, that accepts commands for the browser via HTTP. RC makes it possible to write automated tests for a web application in any programming language, which allows for better integration of Selenium in existing unit test frameworks.

With the release of Selenium 2, Selenium RC has been officially deprecated in favor of Selenium WebDriver.

Selenium IDE:

Selenium IDE is a Firefox Add-On which provides an easy to use interface for developing Automated Tests. Selenium IDE has record & playback feature wherein the user actions performed on the Web Application can be recorded and can be exported as a reusable script in programming languages like Java, C#, Python and Ruby.

Selenium-IDE was originally created by Shinya Kasatani and donated to the Selenium project in 2006. Scripts are recorded in Selenese which is a special test scripting language for Selenium. Selenese provides commands for performing various actions in a browser (click a link, select an option) and for retrieving data from the resulting pages.

Selenium Grid:

Selenium Grid allows you to run your tests in parallel, that is, different tests can be run at the same time on different remote machines and to manage different browser versions and browser configurations centrally (instead of in each individual test). With Selenium Grid, one server acts as the hub. Tests contact the hub to obtain access to browser instances. The hub has a list of servers that provide access to browser instances (WebDriver nodes), and lets tests use these instances. This helps in sharing the load of testing across multiple machines and to run it on different browsers and also in different platforms.

Please watch out this space for more tutorials on Selenium. Till then Happy Testing..!!

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