Friday, February 19, 2010

Whats Selenium?

As we all know everything is automated nowadays you name it and you get it. Similar is the way we do testing of applications. We have got many softwares that can do the automation work for you. Just Record it and Play it and your automation of a use case is done.
One of the famous automation tool in industry is Selenium. Its an Open Source Functional Testing tool.
Selenium provides mainly three types of tools that you can use for automation.
1.
Selenium IDE - is a Firefox add-on that records clicks, typing, and other actions to make a test, which you can play back in the browser.
2.
Selenium RC - runs your tests in multiple browsers and platforms. Tweak your tests in your preferred language.
3.
Selenium Grid - extends Selenium RC to distribute your tests across multiple servers, saving your time by running tests in parallel.

Selenium IDE
It is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run.
Selenium IDE is not only recording tool: it is a complete IDE. You can choose to use its recording capability, or you may edit your scripts by hand. With autocomplete support and the ability to move commands around quickly, Selenium IDE is the ideal environment for creating Selenium tests no matter what style of tests you prefer.

Selenium RC
It is a test tool that allows you to write automated web application UI tests in any programming language against any HTTP website using any mainstream JavaScript-enabled browser.
Selenium RC comes in two parts.
1.A server which automatically launches and kills browsers, and acts as a HTTP proxy for web requests from them.
2.Client libraries for your favorite computer language.
The RC server also bundles Selenium Core, and automatically loads it into the browser.
Selenium Remote Control is great for testing complex AJAX-based web user interfaces under a Continuous Integration system. It is also an ideal solution for users of Selenium Core or Selenium IDE who want to write tests in a more expressive programming language.

Selenium Grid
Selenium RC can only execute your programs in a single type of environment and limited to a single machine. Selenium Grid gives you the power to execute multiple tests in parallel and also onto some remote machines hence saving the time for the test execution.

In my coming posts I will describe in detail how to use Selenium for automation.

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