An open-source tool called Selenium is used to automate test cases for web browsers and apps tested in any web browser. Selenium can only be used to test web apps. Selenium cannot test any desktop software program or mobile application. It is a free program that automates online applications and supports cross-browsing. In this article, we will talk about Selenium and its various components.
Selenium is a potent tool for programmatic web browser control. It is functional across all major browsers and operating systems, and its scripts may be written in a number of languages, including Python, C#, Java, and others. For our purposes, Python will be used. The Selenium RC, Selenium IDE, Selenium GRID as well as Selenium Web driver are the four main parts of Selenium.
Selenium's beginnings can be traced back to the 2000s. A JavaScript module was made by ThoughtWorks engineer Jason Huggins. It has the moniker JavaScriptTestRunner and was used to automate a company website. Huggins' quip that "you may heal heavy metal poisoning by using selenium supplements" gave rise to the moniker selenium. And although this was only a joke that made fun of a rival company called Mercury, those who received the mail message with the joke ran with the name.
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Automation testers all over the world utilize Selenium, which has been around for a while.
Let's examine the four main Selenium components:
Firefox plugins make up the majority of Selenium IDE. It is among the Selenium Suite's simplest frameworks. We can record and replay the scripts thanks to it. Use Selenium WebDriver or Selenium RC for constructing more complex and reliable test cases if you want to use Selenium IDE to generate scripts.
Scripts can be automatically created and manually updated, enabling auto completion and the rapid movement of commands. Selenese, a unique Selenium test scripting language, is used to record scripts. Selenese offers instructions for carrying out activities in a browser (clicking a link, choosing an option, etc.) and for obtaining information from the pages that appear as a result.
The execution of test cases in Selenium IDE is quite slow, and the test case report creation process is subpar when compared to other components. Both parallel and remote test case execution is not supported. A few of Selenium IDE's limitations include:
Before Selenium 2 and the WebDriver merging, Selenium RC, often called Selenium 1, served as the primary Selenium project. JavaScript is primarily used for automation. Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, Java, C#, and Javascript are all supported. It works with practically all current browsers.
JavaScript can also be utilized with the Java driver (via the Rhino engine). The port should vary for each parallel run because the HTML test case requires an instance of the Selenium RC server. However, only 1 RC instance has to be running continuously for the Java/PHP test case.
Some of the features of Selenium RC are:
The disadvantage of Selenium RC is that you have to manually start the Selenium Standalone server each time you wish to run the test cases. The Selenium WeDdriver was created to address this issue.
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The replacement for Selenium RC is Selenium WebDriver. Commands are received by Selenium WebDriver and are then transmitted to a browser in Selenese or via a Client API. A web browser driver is used to do this, sending commands to browsers and retrieving results. There is a browser driver called HtmlUnit that simulates a browser that uses the headless browser HtmlUnit, as opposed to most browser drivers that actually run and access a browser program (such as Firefox, Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, or Microsoft Edge).
A unique server is not required for Selenium WebDriver to run tests. Instead, a browser instance is started and managed by the WebDriver directly. However, both WebDriver and Grid can be utilized to run tests on distant systems (see below). Where possible, WebDriver drives the browser using native operating system-level features rather than browser-specific JavaScript commands. This gets around issues with minor variations among native and JavaScript instructions, such as security constraints.
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The following are supported by Selenium WebDriver:
Support for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and Solaris operating systems
Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome 12.0.712.0, Internet Explorer, and higher, Safari, Opera 11.5 and higher, Android, iOS, and HtmlUnit 2.9 and higher are all supported browsers.
A tool used in conjunction with Selenium RC is Selenium Grid. It is utilized to perform tests concurrently across several devices and browsers. This requires running numerous tests simultaneously against many machines running various operating systems and browsers.
It is advantageous to be able to conduct tests on external browser instances in order to distribute the workload of testing over a number of computers and to run tests in browsers that are supported by multiple platforms or operating systems. The latter is especially helpful when not every browser to be tested can be utilized on the same system.
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Conclusion
In this article, we have discussed Selenium. Selenium is a potent tool for programmatic web browser control. It is functional across all major browsers and operating systems, and its scripts may be written in a number of languages, including Python, C#, Java, and others. For our purposes, Python will be used. We have also talked about the components of Selenium which are Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Selenium Remote Control (RC), WebDriver, and Selenium Grid.
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