Why Java for Selenium? How to Implement Java for Testing

Selenium is the most prominent tool in the field of automation testing, whereas Java, on the other hand, is the most heavily used programming language in today’s market. Both of these technologies together make a perfect combination for automation Testing. Through the medium of this article, I will give you a complete insight into why you should use Java for Selenium. Learn more with the Selenium Online Training.

Introduction to Selenium

Selenium is the most popular open-source tool that is used widely for automating the tests which are carried out on web browsers. In other words, you can test web applications only with Selenium. You can neither test any desktop (software) application nor any mobile application using Selenium. To overcome this, much other software testing and mobile applications testing tools have been introduced in the market such as IBM’s RFT, HP’s QPT, Appium and many more. But still, Selenium dominates the world of  Automation Testing. But the question that arises is, Why?

For starters, as I have already mentioned, Selenium is open-source, thus there is no licensing cost involved. This doesn’t seem much but actually it is a major advantage over other testing tools. Let’s now find out about the rest of the advantage in the next section of this Java for Selenium article.

Advantages of using Selenium

Few advantages are:

• Tests can be carried in any OS such as Windows, Mac or Linux
• Tests can be carried out using a wide range of browsers such as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari or Opera
• It can be integrated with various tools such as TestNG & JUnit for test cases management and report generation
• For continuous testing, it can be integrated with Maven, Jenkins & Docker to achieve Continuous Testing
• Wide range of programming languages are used to write the test cases such as Java, Python, C#, PHP, Ruby, Perl & .Net. But among all these languages Java is most popularly used. 

But why Java? In the next section of this Java for Selenium article, I will give you the reasons for Java being the most popular language for automation.

Why use Java for Selenium?

Java is the most popularly used programming language for Selenium across the world. The below graph shows the usage of Java over other programming languages in India and US.

Below I have listed down the various reasons for using Java for Selenium:

• Since Java is a widely used language in the IT industry, there is a huge community supporting it along with the massive repository of references.
• Nearly 77% of Selenium Testers are using Java which makes knowledge sharing very easy and quick.
• Java is around since ages because of which, there is an abundance of readily available frameworks, plugins, APIs and libraries that supports Java for test automation.
• Java makes use of JVM which makes it a platform-independent language. In other words, you can use it in any Operating environment where JVM is installed.
• As Java is statically typed, the Java IDEs provide a lot of feedback on errors that you might face while coding.

Related Article: Selenium Interview Questions and Answers

I hope this gives you enough reasons to understand the popularity behind the use of Java for Selenium.

Now the question arises, how much you should know in Java to use it with Selenium. In the next section of this article, I will draw an abstract roadmap for you that will help you in getting started.

What to learn in Java for Selenium?

In order to use Java for Selenium, you need to have a brief knowledge of the Java basics, starting off with:

• • What is Java?
  • Data Types
  • Keywords
  • Operators
  • Access Modifiers
  • Methods
  • Control Statements
    • Iterative Statements
      • for
      • while
      • do-while
      • for each
    • Selection Statements
      • if
      • if-else
      • switch
  • Arrays
  • Strings
  • Regular Expressions 
  • Packages
  • Objects and Classes
  • Constructors
  • OOPs Concepts
    • Inheritance
    • Abstraction
    • Encapsulation
    • Polymorphism
  • Exception Handling

Once you are through all these concepts, you can get your feet wet with the coding part. In the next section of this article, I will show you a simple code to implement Java for Selenium.

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Demo to implement Java for Selenium

Before you start with the coding part, first you need to ensure that you have a proper environment setup. In case you don’t, you can refer to the Selenium Installation article for step by step guidance.

Now that you are ready with the environment and dependencies, let’s now get started with the project. Here, I am using a simple project, where I will be making use of GeckoDriver. According to my test case, once I execute my program, the GeckoDriver will launch Mozilla Firefox and navigate to http://twitter.com and sign up into it using the provided credentials.

Related Course: Automation Testing Certification Courses

Since you are already ready with the JARs and other dependencies, all you need to do is type in the below-given code in a class file and execute it.

package edureka.selenium;

import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;

//Importing Selenium WebDrivers
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.ExpectedConditions;
import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.WebDriverWait;

	public class FirstSeleniumScript {
		public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException{
			
			//Setting system properties for GeckoDriver
			System.setProperty("webdriver.gecko.driver", "C:geckodriver-v0.23.0-win64geckodriver.exe");
			WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
		
			driver.manage().window().maximize();
			driver.manage().deleteAllCookies();
			
			//Specifying the timeouts
			driver.manage().timeouts().pageLoadTimeout(40, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
			driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
			
			//Setting the website URL
			driver.get("https://twitter.com/");
			
			//Link text locator to hit the 'Sign Up' button
			driver.findElement(By.linkText("Sign up")).click();
			
			//XPath locator to enter values in the 'name' field
			driver.findElement(By.xpath("//input[@name='name']")).sendKeys("Edureka");
			driver.findElement(By.name("phone_number")).sendKeys("9876543210");
		    
			
			Thread.sleep(1000);
			driver.findElement(By.xpath("//span[contains(text(),'Next')]")).click();

			
		}
	}

This brings us to the end of this Java for Selenium article. If you wish to learn Java in more detail, you can also refer to our other Java articles.

Now that you have understood basics of Java for Selenium, check out the Java Training by Edureka, a trusted online learning company with a network of more than 250,000 satisfied learners spread across the globe. Edureka’s Java J2EE and SOA Training and Certification course is designed for students and professionals who want to be a Java Developer. The course is designed to give you a head start into Java programming and train you for core and advanced Java concepts and various Java frameworks like Hibernate & Spring.

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