Introduction to Selenium,Selenium IDE, Selenium Remote Control Server

This article gives the introduction to Selenium, Selenium IDE and Selenium Remote Control Server.

• Selenium is a popular open-source automation suite for Web Applications.
• Web Applications can be tested across different browsers as well as platforms.
• Selenium is similar to QTP but it mainly focuses on the Web based applications.
• Selenium is not a single tool. It’s a suite of softwares, each catering different needs of an organization.

Selenium has the following four components.

• Selenium Integrated Development Environment(S-IDE)
• Selenium Remote Control(RC)
• Web Driver
• Selenium Grid

Selenium Integrated Development Environment(S-IDE):

S-IDE is the simplest Selenium Framework as well as easy to learn. It’s just a Firefox plugin which can be installed like other Firefox plugins. This plugin can be used as a prototyping protocol due to its simplicity. We need to use either Web Driver or Selenium Remote Control if need to create more advanced Test cases.

S-IDE has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages:

• Easy to install.
• No programming experience is required.
• Can export the tests to formats usable in Web Driver or Selenium Remote Control.
• Have support to extensions.

Disadvantages:

• Available only in Firefox.
• Designed to create only prototype of Tests.
• Test execution is very slow when comparing with Selenium Web Driver / Remote Control.
• No support for iterations.

 Introduction to Selenium Remote Control (RC):

This is first Web Automation tool which allowed the users to use the programming language they prefer. As of now, RC supports the following programming languages.

• Java
• C#
• Python
• Perl
• Ruby
• PHP

Advantages of RC:

• Faster execution of Test cases than IDE.
• Can support multiple browsers and platforms. 
• Can perform conditional and looping operations.
• Supports Data Driven Testing. 
• Has the complete API.

Disadvantages of RC:

• Installation is complicated than S-IDE. 
•  Programming knowledge is required. 
• Needs selenium RC Server running all the time to execute the tests. 
• Browser interaction is less realistic. 
• Inconsistent result & User JavaScript. 
•  API consist redundant and confusing commands.

The details about Web Driver and Selenium Grid are explained in a separate article.

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