Selenium IDE in an integrated development environment which tests code while integrating browser activity. The main ambition of writing these types of tests is to mimic user actions to determine if the web server and database are behaving as expected as they carry out the users’ commands. Documents are the heart of selenium tests. These commands are a way of knowing what part of the application is being tested and what the user expects the browser to present. Writing tests is almost simple with selenium. The end product of a selenium test can be transformed to any language, however, by default, selenium scripts are simply a combination of “Selenese” commands in an HTML format. However, by creating or downloading a user extension, JavaScript commands may also be implemented. User extensions themselves are created with JavaScript by adding methods to the Selenium object prototype. More insights of this automation testing can be gained from Selenium training through online learning.
Selenium is an open-source and a portable automated software testing tool for testing web applications. It has capabilities to operate across different browsers and operating systems. Selenium is not just a single tool but a set of tools that helps testers to automate web-based applications more efficiently.
Let us now understand each one of the tools available in the Selenium suite and their usage.
Tool & Description
Selenium IDE
Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a Firefox plugin that lets testers to record their actions as they follow the workflow that they need to test.
Selenium RC
Selenium Remote Control (RC) was the flagship testing framework that allowed more than simple browser actions and linear execution. It makes use of the full power of programming languages such as Java, C#, PHP, Python, Ruby and PERL to create more complex tests.
Selenium WebDriver
Selenium WebDriver is the successor to Selenium RC which sends commands directly to the browser and retrieves results.
Selenium Grid
Selenium Grid is a tool used to run parallel tests across different machines and different browsers simultaneously which results in minimized execution time.
The Selenium-IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is an easy-to-use Firefox plug-in to develop Selenium test cases. It provides a Graphical User Interface for recording user actions using Firefox which is used to learn and use Selenium, but it can only be used with Firefox browser as other browsers are not supported.
However, the recorded scripts can be converted into various programming languages supported by Selenium and the scripts can be executed on other browsers as well.