Overview of Selenium Tools
Selenium is a web based test automation suite, which consists of four tool components. Integrated Development Environment was the first tool that was developed for automating functional testing as a Firefox plug-in. Then came Selenium Remote Control, which was developed for testing web application using test scripts written in any programming language. Selenium Web Driver was the next selenium tool released along with the web drivers specific to all the major browsers. Finally, Selenium Grid was launched to work along with web driver, where the Grid acts as a server/ hub and the drivers from the browsers acts as a node.
Selenium Tools
There are 4 Tools of Selenium:
- Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
- Selenium Remote Control (RC)
- Selenium Web Driver
- Selenium Grid
1. Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment)
- Implemented as Mozilla Firefox extension, Selenium IDE provides recording as well as playback functionality on test scripts.
- Selenium IDE also gives the testers the credibility to test the script written in R Spec, Python, Java, HTML, Ruby, C#, J Unit, and Test NG.
- Selenium IDE has a very less variable range and test scripts produced through selenium IDE are not very feasible, robust and portable. Casually selenium IDE supports all the browsers. The browsers like Firefox 3, 2, 3.x are supported by Selenium 1. Safari 2,3,4 and Opera 8,9,10 are also supported. It is implemented as a Firefox Add-On and as a Chrome Extension. It also provides autocompletion support and the ability to move commands around very quickly.
2. Selenium Remote Control
- Officially deprecated by selenium, Selenium RC allows manual testers to script their code for web or mobile application UI tests or automation tests in any of the scripting languages or supported programming language.
- It also gives a task to a proxy HTTP server which allows knowing that the tested application which comes from the domain provided by the proxy server is available to be tested in a web browser.
It also comes with two components which are :
- Library which has your programming language code i.e Selenium RC Client.
- It also behaves as an HTTP proxy for web requests that can be consolidated as Selenium RC Server.
Selenium RC had been in the trend for being quite more efficient and more effective for testing complex web user interfaces based on ajax and experiences under a continuous integration system. Selenium RC benefits included the ability to use remote browsers, and the lesser the need to port every line of code to an increasingly growing set of languages.
3. Selenium WebDriver
- Selenium Web Driver is by far the most effective and important part of the Selenium Suite.
- It provides programming or scripting-based interface to create and run test cases. Test Scripts ( most probably web tests) are scripted in order to recognize web components and then the desired task is made for action on those elements on web pages or portals.
- Selenium web driver productivity is much higher as direct web browser calls are made available without any mediator. Web Driver directly takes actions on different browsers or compilers so that every time we have that most identical driver for every browser.
Some of the most widely selenium suite web drivers include :
- HTML Unit Driver
- Safari Driver
- Opera Driver
- Internet Explorer Driver
- Google Chrome Driver
- Mozilla Firefox Driver (Gecko Driver)
4. Selenium Grid
- Selenium Grid is also one of the most important components of Selenium Suite which makes us take actions on our tests on different machines or servers in contrast to different or unique browsers in parallel world-mechanism or a parallel environment.
- In other words, we can say that we can compile and run our script tests in a parallel environment on different machines or virtual machines running on different operating systems and browsers.
Advantages of Selenium Tool
Till now we must have understood the selenium tool and its core principles and components with details. Now its time to learn some advantages and disadvantages of it.
So here are some Advantages of Selenium Tool:
- It is open source
- It has no upfront, out-of-pocket costs, so it is free
- It can run under multiple browsers
- Selenium scripts are created by recording actions using the web application under test running in a browser which is much useful attribute for testers and testing environment.
- It does not bind QA’s choice of build systems, reporting tools or any other aspect of their testing framework.
- It integrates well with popular testing tools such as Hudson, Sauce Labs, Selenium-Grid, Q Metry, and others.
- Supports web applications that implement a part of their functionality within the browser using JavaScript and AJAX technologies.
- Selenium supports various programming languages to write programs.
- Selenium supports Parallel Test Execution.
- Selenium uses less Hardware resources.
Disadvantages of Selenium Tool
Here are some of the disadvantages.
- No Built-in Reporting facility.
- No Test Tool integration for Test Management.
- New features may not work properly.
- Limited support for Image Testing.
- Difficult to Setup Test Environment when it compares to Vendor Tools like UFT, RFT, Silk Test, etc…
- Difficult to use takes more time to create Test cases.
- It supports Web-based applications only.
- No reliable Technical Support from anybody.
After getting through this much knowledge about the selenium tool I can say that till the time it is free and open-source for a web developer, it is the best and most effective testing tool available in the market for testing web or mobile-based user interfaces.
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