Choose The Right Selenium Tool for Your Business Needs

Selenium is a common testing suite created in 2004 by Jason Huggins. It has grown since then. The Selenium Testing Packages that are not dependent on platform and browser offer several options to testers, who can choose the right one as per requirement.

The three selenium tools includes…

Selenium IDE

Also known as Selenium Recorder, this is a Firefox add-on that allows editing, recording, and debugging tests. The scripts recorded in Selenium IDE are created with Selenese, the testing language. Selenium IDE has the following advantages:

• Best choice for beginners and those who want to execute record-replay test cases
• Selenium Core allows quick record and playback of tests in the ecosystem that they would execute in
• The context menu allows testers to choose from a set of commands for any chosen UI element
• Helps in quick editing of tests. It contains an auto-complete function that includes all common test commands.

The tool is for beginners to learn Selenium script syntax. Selenium IDE would be the best choice when you require to test a small change before putting it into a regression testing suite. If you want to develop an extensive application of test cases or want to use any other language other than Selenese then Selenium IDE might not suit your needs.

Selenium Remote Control

The Selenium Remote Control was one of the main tools offered for a long time. It renders a server written in Java that utilizes client libraries to accept commands for browser through HTTP. It allows smooth integration of Selenium into existent test frameworks, as it allows compiling tests in any programming language for web applications.

Selenium RC has 2 components:

• A server that automatically gets launched and kills browsers. It serves as an HTTP proxy for the Selenese commands that interprets these and executes the test case.
• Client libraries for the choicest programming language, which offer APIs to convert each of the commands into the corresponding Selenese. After passing the command to the server to activate running the test case, it receives the run result that could be stored and comprehended.

Selenium Remote Control can be a good choice for verifying complex AJAX-based web user interfaces. Several languages include C#, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, and PHP are backed by Selenium RC. However, the development of this tool has stopped though the existing versions are provided with assistance for maintenance.

Selenium WebDriver

Selenium WebDriver is the successor to Selenium RC and negates the limitations it had. It is also known as Selenium 2 and was built by adding the WebDriver API functionality to Selenium 1. It is designed simply and compactly.

Here are the following benefits of Selenium WebDriver:

• Selenium WebDriver is a packed Object Oriented API. Therefore the functionality is better organized that uses classes and that makes its usage easy. Any action which needs extensive coding in Selenium 1 could be accomplished efficiently by using Selenium WebDriver classes.
• It drives the browser effectively, by making use of the browser’s domestic support for automation. This promotes to development of more complicated test cases to allow extensive interface testing.
• Get rid of the restraints associated with Selenium RC’s Single Host origin policy which is a result of the use of javascript to communicate with browsers.
•  It assists dynamic webpages, where small elements of a page might have changed but the entire page might not be loaded again.
• Many browser vendors including Mozilla, Opera, Google do take part in the development of WebDriver’s, which ensures that test cases involving these browsers would be offered assistance.

WebDriver will be a permanent and compact testing solution whose popularity would rise gradually in the future! So have you decided on your choice of Selenium package?