Selenium

1. What is selenium?

Selenium is a free open source automation testing framework used to validate web application across different browsers and platform. It supports many programming language like Python, Javascript, etc,.

• Selenium automates web applications only.
• Selenium does not automates desktop applications.
• Selenium came with Java support first. Later, it started to support Python, PHP, Javascript, C#, Ruby etc.
• Testing using the selenium framework is called selenium testing.

Selenium test tool suite:

• Selenium IDE.
  Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is primarily a record/run tool that a test case developer uses to develop Selenium Test cases. Selenium IDE is an easy-to-use tool from the Selenium Test Suite and can even be used by someone new to developing automated test cases for their web applications.

• Selenium Webdriver.
  Selenium WebDriver is a collection of open source APIs which are used to automate the testing of a web application. Description: Selenium WebDriver tool is used to automate web application testing to verify that it works as expected. It supports many browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, IE, and Safari.

• Selenium Remote Control.
  Selenium RC is an important component in the Selenium test suite. It is a testing framework that enables a QA or a developer to write test cases in any programming language in order to automate UI tests for web applications against any HTTP website.

• Selenium Grid.
  Selenium Grid is a smart proxy server that makes it easy to run tests in parallel on multiple machines. This is done by routing commands to remote web browser instances, where one server acts as the hub. This hub routes test commands that are in JSON format to multiple registered Grid nodes.

2. Why do we use Selenium for automation?

Selenium automates web browser. Primarily it is used for automating web application for testing purposes, but it is certainly not limited to just that. Different browsers like Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer are supported by it, and you can easily automate browser testing across these browsers using the benefits of Selenium. Boring web based administration tasks can also be automated as well. You can also see automated tests being performed on your computer screen.