It’s Selenium, Introduction and Features.

By TestNBug in Selenium 4 Comments
selenium-poster

One of my friend had a plan to ‘Learn Selenium’ and it’s still the plan today, almost 2 years passed by 🙂 . The list of excuses have gone to complete the notebook. If you are one of those or eager to learn selenium, This is the place for you to start with. In this post, we will quick start with the introduction and features of the so called S-e-l-e-n-i-u-m.

Before we start, Note that, its not Rocket science to learn selenium. Many of us feel like, we need to be expert in java. It’s not, you need to know the basics of the language. Chalo, keep all your doubts aside and Jump.

What is Selenium?

Selenium is a tool which automates browsers. That’s It.
It’s mostly used for automating Web Based applications unlike QTP.

Why selenium, a hotcake ?

Selenium Hot-Cake

  • Its an open source tool (Freeware). Licenses of other tools cost you a bomb.
  • Selenium can run scripts across different browsers i.e, its cross-browser compliant.
  • Can design the scripts in different languages. Muti-language backend support (Java, Ruby,PHP,etc)
  • Supports different operating systems.

So What, Why should I use/Learn ?

  • Increases you marketability, Adds huge weight to your resume.
  • Assist with the deployment of defective-free code.
  • Growing Industry standard.
  • Leading automation tool in the market (open source).

The Suite

Selenium is a suite of four, its a package.

  • Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
  • Selenium RC / Selenium 1 (Remote Control)
  • Webdriver
  • Selenium Grid

Selenium RC and Webdriver are merged to form a more powerful tool called Selenium 2, with Webdriver being the main.

Selenium-Suite

Selenium as chemical element is used to treat Mercury Poisoning (QTP formerly known as Mercury).

Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE is a complete Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for developing Selenium tests (previously known as Selenium Recorder). It’s like video recorder which records user actions and plays back. It’s a Firefox extension that allows recording, editing and playback of tests.

Selenium RC

Before getting in RC, we need to know few terms related to web development:

HTML: To define the content of web pages like the Headings, Images.
CSS: To specify the layout of web pages like Color, Margins, Alignment.
JavaScript: To program the behavior of web pages like validations.

when the browser is loaded, Selenium RC ‘injects’ JavaScript functions into the browser and then uses it to drive the application in the browser. To do so, it uses a Proxy server as a medium between the editor (where code is written) and Browser. This server needs to started manually every time its run.

Selenium-RC

Webdriver

Webdriver is straight forward, Makes direct calls to the browser using browser’s native support for automation. Thus, Eliminating the server. It is Designed to provide a simpler, more clear interface while addressing limitations in the Selenium-RC.

It Provides better support to dynamic pages where elements of page may change without the page being reloaded.

Selenium Webdriver

Selenium Grid

Selenium Grid allows to run multiple tests across different browsers, operating systems, and machines in parallel. Which means, different tests can be run at the same time on different remote machines.

Key Features of Selenium

selenium-features

Selenium-WebDriver supports the following browsers along with the operating systems these browsers are compatible with.

  • Google Chrome
  • Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 – 32 and 64-bit where applicable
  • Firefox: latest ESR, previous ESR, current release, one previous release
  • Safari
  • Opera
  • HtmlUnit
  • phantomjs
  • Android (with Selendroid or appium)
  • iOS (with ios-driver or appium)

In the further posts we will learn about these features in detailed version with installations.

Reference : Selenium Documentation
PC: Choclate cake- foodadvisor.my

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