01_Selenium_Projects

What Selenium is All About

This is how Selenium HQ defines it:

Selenium automates browsers. That's it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you.

Selenium is an umbrella project encapsulating a variety of tools and libraries enabling web browser automation.

SeleniumHQ Projects

• Selenium WebDriver - can drive a browser natively either locally or on remote machines.
• Selenium Grid - extending selenium RC / selenium server to allow runnings tests on different machines/VMs at the same time
• Selenium IDE - Chrome and Firefox Extension
• Selenium Remote Control - client/server system that allows control of web browsers locally or on other computers
• HTML Runner - Allows run Test Suites (exports from Selenium IDE) from the command line.

Some historical information

• Selenium RC

  • A server written in JAVA
  • Accepts commands via HTTP
  • Loads javascript libraries along with Web Application Under Test.
  • Deprecated in favor of Selenium WebDriver

• Selenium WebDriver

  • Selenium 2.0
    • Selenium 1.0 + WebDriver
  • Selenium 3.0
    • Original Selenium Core is removed
    • Better, more object-oriented API
    • Evolution of w3c webdriver specification
    • Development of webdrivers shifted from SeleniumHQ to browser providers (chromedriver, geckodriver, safaridriver,webdriver)
    • Mobile automation support got removed and shifted to Appium
  • Selenium 4.0 (Alpha)
    • Optimizations to selenium grid (Each conceptual piece in its own process i.e. sessions, distributor, router, nodes)
    • Better support for dockers
    • Remove support for further browsers (Opera, PhantomJS, HtmlUnit)
    • Compliance with new w3c webdriver
    • API changes

• Selenium IDE

  • Support stopped in 2017
  • Came back again to life in 2018 with using modern browser plugin. Therefore available with Chrome and Firefox
    • The new Selenium IDE test suites can be exported and run through command line

Some Key Benefits

We can use Selenium WebDriver to do the following:

• Create robust, browser-based regression automation
• Scale and distribute scripts across many browsers and platforms
• Create scripts in your favourite programming language

Further Reading Material

1. https://www.seleniumhq.org/
2. https://docs.seleniumhq.org/docs/
3. https://seleniumhq.github.io/docs/site/en/
4. https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium
5. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/selenium-users
6. https://twitter.com/seleniumhq
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selenium_(software)#History
8. https://seleniumhq.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/the-road-to-selenium-3/
9. https://saucelabs.com/blog/move-over-selenium-2-why-its-time-to-upgrade-to-selenium-3
10. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-selenium-3-0-and-selenium-2-0
11. https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/wiki/Selenium-Grid-4
12. https://testsigma.com/blog/selenium-4-automation-engineer-expect/
13. https://medium.com/@4400vijay/selenium-4-alpha-is-released-whats-new-7fce5e8cd926
14. https://seleniumhq.github.io/selenium/docs/api/javascript/