|
Screenshot
Demonstration of the Selenium |
|
| Stable release | 2.15 / December 8, 2011 |
| Development status | Active |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | software testing framework for web applications |
| License | Apache License 2.0 |
| Website | Official website |
Selenium is a portable software testing framework for web applications. Selenium provides a record/playback tool for authoring tests without learning a test scripting language (Selenium IDE). It also provides a test domain-specific language (Selenese) [1] to write tests in a number of popular programming languages, including C#, Java, Groovy, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. The tests can then be run against most modern web browsers. Selenium deploys on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh platforms.
Contents |
Selenium was originally developed by Jason Huggins, who was later joined by other programmers and testers at ThoughtWorks. It is open-source software, released under the Apache 2.0 license and can be downloaded and used without charge. The latest side project is Selenium Grid, which provides a hub allowing the running of multiple Selenium tests concurrently on any number of local or remote systems, thus minimizing test execution time.
Selenium IDE is a complete integrated development environment (IDE) for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows recording, editing, and debugging tests. It was previously known as Selenium Recorder.
Scripts may be automatically recorded and edited manually providing autocompletion support and the ability to move commands around quickly.
Scripts are recorded in Selenese, a special test scripting language for selenium. Selenese provides commands for performing actions in a browser (click a link, select an option), and for retrieving data from the resulting pages.
Features:
As an alternative to writing tests in Selenese, tests can also be written in various programming languages. These tests then communicate with Selenium by calling methods in the Selenium Client API. Selenium currently provides client APIs for Java, C#, Ruby and Python.
With Selenium 2, a new Client API was introduced (with WebDriver as its central component). However, the old API (using class Selenium) is still supported.
Selenium Remote Control (RC) is a server, written in Java, that accepts commands for the browser via HTTP. RC makes it possible to write automated tests for a web application in any programming language, which allows for better integration of Selenium in existing unit test frameworks. To make writing tests easier, Selenium project currently provides client drivers for PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, Perl and Java. The Java driver can also be used with JavaScript (via the Rhino engine). A new instance of selenium RC server is needed to launch html test case - which means that the port should be different for each parallel run. However for Java/PHP test case only one Selenium RC instance needs to be running continuously.
With the release of Selenium 2, Selenium RC has been officially deprecated in favor of Selenium WebDriver.
Selenium WebDriver is the successor to Selenium RC. Selenium WebDriver accepts commands (sent in Selenese, or via a Client API) and sends them to a browser. This is implemented through a browser-specific browser driver, which sends commands to a browser, and retrieves results. Most browser drivers actually launch and access a browser application (such as Firefox or Internet Explorer); there is also a HtmlUnit browser driver, which simulates a browser using HtmlUnit.
Unlike in Selenium 1, where the Selenium RC server was necessary to run tests, Selenium WebDriver does not need a special server to execute tests. Instead, the WebDriver directly starts a browser instance and controls it. However, Selenium Grid can be used with WebDriver to execute tests on remote systems (see below).
Selenium Grid is a server that allows tests to use web browser instances running on remote machines. With Selenium Grid, one server acts as the hub. Tests contact the hub to obtain access to browser instances. The hub has a list of servers that provide access to browser instances (WebDriver nodes), and lets tests use these instances. Selenium Grid allows to run tests in parallel on multiple machines, and to manage different browser versions and browser configurations centrally (instead of in each individual test).