Selenium — Getting started with Selenium Automation Testing

What is Selenium?

Selenium is an open-source tool with the ability to automate browsers with particular browser bindings for automating web applications for testing plans. It is a set of four tools intended for various purposes. Let’s get to understand about Selenium in detail and the various tools that it offers.

Selenium Suite of tools

It has four significant elements with a distinct strategy for selenium automation testing, which is famous as the Selenium set of tools. Every software tester or developer takes tools out of it depending upon the testing essential for the organization.

Selenium RC (Remote Control)

Selenium Core was the primary tool in the Series of tools. Though, it was opposed as it had some problems related to cross-domain testing because of the same-origin plan. So, to succeed that, Selenium Remote Control (Selenium RC) was added after the Selenium core. RC turned out as an aid to the cross-domain issue.

Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE, known as Selenium recorder in the beginning, is a tool used to copy, edit, debug, and replay functional experiments. Selenium IDE is implemented as an addition to the Chrome browser and add-on in Firefox browser. With the Selenium IDE plugin, you can record and export tests in any of the supported programming languages like Ruby, Java, PHP, Javascript, etc.

Selenium Grid

Selenium Grid is based on Hub-node architecture. With Selenium Grid, you can run identical test assemblies over various browsers. Hub measures Selenium scripts running on multiple nodes(specific browser inside an OS), and test scripts working on multiple nodes can be written in any programming language.

Selenium Grid was employed with RC to test multiple analyses on remote machines. Now, as people find Webdriver robust than RC, therefore Grid works with both Webdriver and RC.

Selenium Webdriver

Selenium Webdriver is an intensified version of Selenium RC and the most utilized tool. It accepts instructions via client API and transfers them to browsers. Put, Selenium Webdriver is a browser-specific operator that assists in locating and launching the various browsers. It presents an interface to record and run automation scripts. Every browser has different drivers to run tests.

Selenium Client API

It is the most advanced tool in the Series of tools. With Selenium Client API, you can compose test scripts in several programming languages rather than writing test scripts in Selenese. Selenium client API is accessible for Java, JavaScript, C#, Ruby, and Python. These scripts can interact with Selenium with predefined instructions and purposes of Client API.

Why Selenium Automation Testing?

Since we are now accustomed to Selenium and its Suite of tools, let’s find out the several advantages of Selenium which make it stand from the crowd as a tool for automation testing:

1. Open Source Tool: As it is an open-source tool, it doesn’t need any licensing charges, which provide it an upper hand over other automation testing tools.
2. Tool for Every need: As discussed earlier, Selenium has a series of tools, so it changes every requirement of the users. You can use several tools like WebDriver, Grid, IDE for meeting your various needs.
3. Supports all major languages: The significant difficulty that a tester or developer faces with an automation testing tool is the guide for languages. As Selenium supports all significant languages like Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, C sharp, Perl, .Net, and PHP, it is more straightforward for testers to manage.
4. The browser and Operating System support: Selenium supports various browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, Edge, and Safari, and various operating systems like Windows, Linux, Mac. This makes it adaptable to use.
5. Community Support: Selenium has an effective open community that supports you resolve your concerns and questions related to it. This makes it the most suitable alternative for your automation testing tool.