What is Selenium?
Selenium automates browsers. That's it. What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) also be automated as well.
Selenium has the support of some of the largest browser vendors who have taken (or are taking) steps to make Selenium a native part of their browser. It is also the core technology in countless other browser automation tools, APIs and frameworks.
Elements of Selenium
ReplyDelete~ Selenium IDE: It only installs in Firefox as an add-on. Firefox only supports selenium IDE. Just like other functional testing tools, it contains record and play/run feature. One can also extend IDE functionality with the help of the user extentions. Selenium IDE supports loops, regular expressions, if statements and many more features. It is based of Java Script. Using selenium IDE the test cases can be parametrized.
~ Selenium RC: Selenium RC is a client-server arrangement that allows to control web browsers locally or on other computers, using any programming language and testing framework.
RC works in multiple browsers and runs tests in the multiple browsers. Selenium RC can manipulate browser, check for assertions via corresponding RC driver. One can implement Selenium RC in any of the programming language mentioned above. RC also supports different frameworks as per the specific language. RC is the older version.
~ Webdriver: Webdriver can run browsers natively either locally or on remote machines. Webdriver also works in multiple browsers and runs tests in the multiple browsers. Testing frameworks are not wanted, but they can be helpful if one wants to automate tests. Webdriver supports Iphone and Andriod testing. It has latest features which is not available in Selenium RC. Webdriver doesn't require any server to work.
~ Selenium Grid: To run test cases parallely on multiple machines and browsers Selenium Grid is used. By running tests on multiple servers at the same time, cutting down on time it takes to test multiple browsers or operating systems as a whole.