Selenium.....

runs in many browsers and operating systems
can be controlled by many programming languages and testing frameworks.


What is Selenium?
Selenium automates browsers. That's it. What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) also be automated as well.


Selenium has the support of some of the largest browser vendors who have taken (or are taking) steps to make Selenium a native part of their browser. It is also the core technology in countless other browser automation tools, APIs and frameworks.
If you want to

• create robust, browser-based regression automation
• scale and distribute scripts across many environments

Then you want to use Selenium WebDriver; a collection of language specific bindings to drive a browser -- the way it is meant to be driven.
Selenium WebDriver is the successor of Selenium Remote Control which has been officially deprecated.

Introducing WebDriver
The primary new feature in Selenium 2.0 is the integration of the WebDriver API. WebDriver is designed to providing an simpler, more concise programming interface along with addressing some limitations in the Selenium-RC API. Selenium-WebDriver was developed to better support dynamic web pages where elements of a page may change without the page itself being reloaded. WebDriver’s goal is to supply a well-designed object-oriented API that provides improved support for modern advanced web-app testing problems.

How Does WebDriver ‘Drive’ the Browser Compared to Selenium-RC?
Selenium-WebDriver makes direct calls to the browser using each browser’s native support for automation. How these direct calls are made, and the features they support depends on the browser you are using. Information on each ‘browser driver’ is provided later in this chapter.
For those familiar with Selenium-RC, this is quite different from what you are used to. Selenium-RC worked the same way for each supported browser. It ‘injected’ javascript functions into the browser when the browser was loaded and then used its javascript to drive the AUT within the browser. WebDriver does not use this technique. Again, it drives the browser directly using the browser’s built in support for automation.