If you ask a lazy Tester about their favorite testing tool, there is a high probability that you will get “Selenium ” as an answer. That’s because it is the perfect tool for Automation Testing of a web application. In this article, let’s see what are the various Selenium Components that make it so popular. You can learn more from the Selenium Course.
Let’s get started!
Introduction to Selenium
Selenium is an open-source tool which is used for automating the test cases carried out on web browsers or the web applications that are being tested using any web browser. Wait, before you get carried away, let me re-iterate that, only testing of web applications is possible with Selenium. We can neither test any desktop software application nor test any mobile application using Selenium. So it’s an open-source tool which supports cross browsing and automates web applications!
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Now let’s see what are the various components that Selenium comprise of.
Selenium Components
Selenium is mainly comprised of a suite of tools, which include:
- Selenium IDE
- Selenium RC
- Selenium WebDriver
- Selenium Grid
Let’s understand the functionalities of each of these tools in more detail.
Selenium IDE
Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is mainly a Firefox plugin. It is one of the simplest frameworks in the Selenium Suite. It allows us to record and playback the scripts. If you wish to create scripts using Selenium IDE, you need to use Selenium RC or Selenium WebDriver to write more advanced and robust test cases.
In Selenium IDE, the test case execution is very slow, and the report generation step for the test cases is not good as compared with other components. It doesn’t support test case execution in parallel or remote execution.
Few drawbacks of Selenium IDE are:
It restricts the test case execution to the Firefox browser.
It doesn’t extend the support to mobile-based testing like iPhone/Android testing.
The execution of test cases is very slow and the report generation step is not good when compared with other components.
Next, let’s see what is Selenium RC.
Selenium RC
Selenium RC, also known as Selenium 1, was the main Selenium project for a long time before the WebDriver merge brought up Selenium 2. It mainly relies on JavaScript for automation. It supports Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl and C#, Java, Javascript. It supports almost every browser out there.
Note: Selenium RC is officially deprecated.
Some other features of Selenium RC:
It is based on JavaScript. It doesn’t support a Record/Playback feature.
It is based on a client/server architecture, which implies -> whenever you want to execute the test cases/test scripts, you need to start the server manually.
It supports parallel execution of test cases as well as remote execution with the help of Selenium Grid.
The drawback of Selenium RC is that whenever you want to execute the test cases, you should start Selenium Standalone server manually. In order to overcome this problem, Selenium WeDdriver was introduced.
Related Learning: Selenium 4 Features
Selenium WebDriver
Selenium WebDriver is a browser automation framework that accepts commands and sends them to a browser. It is implemented through a browser-specific driver. It directly communicates with the browser and controls it. Selenium WebDriver supports various programming languages like – Java, C#, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby. and Javascript.
Selenium WebDriver supports the following:
- Operation System Support – Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Solaris
- Browser Support – Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome 12.0.712.0 and above, Safari, Opera 11.5 and above, Android, iOS, HtmlUnit 2.9 and above.
If you wish to know more about Selenium WebDriver, kindly refer to this article on Selenium tutorial. Now let’s understand the last component i.e Selenium Grid.
Selenium Grid
Selenium Grid is a tool which is used together with Selenium RC. It runs tests on different machines against different browsers in parallel. This implies – running multiple tests simultaneously against different machines running different browsers and operating systems. You can also refer to this article on Selenium Grid to understand the concepts at a broader gauge.
So this was all about the Selenium Components. With this, we come to an end of this article. I hope you understood the concepts and helped in adding value to your knowledge. Now, if you want to get more insights into Selenium, you can check out our other articles on Selenium.
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