Selenium Web Driver Introduction

Selenium Web Driver Introduction:

Selenium Web Driver is a tool for writing automated tests of websites. It aims to mimic the behavior of a real user, and as such interacts with the HTML of the application.

Selenium is possibly the most widely-used open source solution.

Simon Stewart developed webdriver API in 2006.

Selenium is not just a single tool but a suite of software’s, each catering to different testing needs of an organization. It has four components.

Selenium can automate only web based applications.

Supported Browsers:

Selenium supports most of the browsers but we should be noted IDE supports only Firefox and RC and Webdriver supports all most all browsers.

Selenium IDE plug-in available only for Firefox. We can record and run any web application.

Selenium RC supports all browsers but every time we need to run the RC server.

Selenium web driver supports all browsers and we no need to run RC server and it will invoke browsers directly and run successfully.

HtmlUnit driver is used to Run in the background and it won’t display UI. The advantage of HTML unit driver is very fast. This is nothing but headless browser testing.

Mozilla Firefox
Internet Explorer
Google Chrome
Safari
Opera
HTML Unit
Ghost Driver……….

Selenium supported programming languages:

Selenium supports most of the programming languages. So, no need to depend on any technology so you can work on selenium with the programming language you familiar.

In IDE don’t have any option to write any script, it’s just a record and playback tool. But you have an option to generate a script in the above-mentioned programming language.

Once you got the script you can add in Eclipse IDE

java
.Net
PHP
Python
Ruby
Perl

Note 1: WebDriver is an advanced version of Selenium RC

Note 2: WebDriver is also called Selenium2

Note 3: Web Driver is faster than Selenium RC as it is directly communicating

with browsers.

Note 4: Selenium RC is slower, as it acts as a middleman in between selenium and

Browser. So every time you run RC server ON before running the script.

Note 5: Web Driver is introduced in 2006

To download or selenium official website click here

Web Driver limitation:

Web Driver has no built-in feature that automatically generates test results