- May 31, 2018
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What is Selenium?
Selenium is a portable software testing framework for web applications. Selenium provides a playback (formerly also recording) tool for authoring tests without the need to learn a test scripting language (Selenium IDE). It also provides a test domain specific language (Selenese) to write tests in a number of popular programming languages, including C#, Groovy, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Scala. The tests can then run against most modern web browsers. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and macOS platforms. It is open-source software, released under the Apache 2.0 license: web developers can download and use it without charge.
Selenium is a free (open source) automated testing suite for web applications across different browsers and platforms. It is quite similar to HP Quick Test Pro (QTP now UFT) only that Selenium focuses on automating web-based applications. Testing done using Selenium tool is usually referred as Selenium Testing.
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 Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
- Selenium Remote Control (RC)
- WebDriver
- Selenium Grid
At the moment, Selenium RC and WebDriver are merged into a single framework to form Selenium 2. Selenium 1, by the way, refers to Selenium RC.
Who developed Selenium?
Since Selenium is a collection of different tools, it had different developers as well. Below are the key persons who made notable contributions to the Selenium Project
Primarily, Selenium was created by Jason Huggins in 2004. An engineer at ThoughtWorks, he was working on a web application that required frequent testing. Having realized that the repetitious Manual Testing of their application was becoming more and more inefficient, he created a Javascript program that would automatically control the browser’s actions. He named this program as the “JavaScriptTestRunner.”
Seeing potential in this idea to help automate other web applications, he made JavaScriptRunner open-source which was later re-named as Selenium Core.
Brief Introduction WebDriver
The WebDriver proves itself to be better than both Selenium IDE and Selenium RC in many aspects. It implements a more modern and stable approach in automating the browser’s actions. WebDriver, unlike Selenium RC, does not rely on JavaScript for Automation. It controls the browser by directly communicating with it.
The supported languages are the same as those in Selenium RC.
- Java
- C#
- PHP
- Python
- Perl
- Ruby
