Selenium Tool Suite - A Brief Introduction

Selenium suite is comprised of multiple software components, they are as follows -

Selenium 2 or Selenium WebDriver – It is a product of merger between Selenium & WebDriver. It supports the WebDriver API, along with the Selenium 1 technology. WebDriver is a tool for writing automated tests of web based applications. It aims to emulate the behavior of a real user, and as such interacts with the HTML of the application. It provides object oriented support & WebDriver API. This is latest/ newest addition in Selenium family.

Selenium 1 or Selenium RC or Remote Control – It allows to write automated web application UI tests in any programming language (Java, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl and C#) against any HTTP website using any mainstream JavaScript-enabled browser. It 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.

It is suitable for testing complex AJAX-based web user. It is also an ideal solution for users of Selenium IDE who want to write tests in a more expressive programming language than the Selenese HTML table format.

Selenium IDE – Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a rapid prototyping tool for building test scripts. It is a Firefox plugin and provides an easy-to-use interface for developing automated tests. Selenium IDE has a recording feature, which records user actions as they are performed and then exports them as a reusable script in one of many programming languages that can be later executed.

It is not designed to run your test passes nor is it designed to build all the automated tests you will need. It doesn’t provide iteration or conditional statements. It is recommended that for scalable & robust test automation use Selenium 2 or Selenium RC.

Selenium-Grid – Selenium-Grid facilitates to run test suites in multiple environments simultaneously. It allows executing tests in parallel, that is, same or different tests can be run at the same time on different remote machines. It benefits in following ways –

1. Suppose there is a large test suite, or a slow-running test suite, you can boost its performance substantially by using Selenium Grid to divide your test suite to run different tests at the same time using different machines.
2. Suppose requirement is to run test suite on multiple environments, you can have different remote machines supporting and running your tests in them at the same time.

In both situations, Selenium Grid reduces execution time.