Basic information about selenium

Posted by kathiravan on March 7th, 2019

The basics of selenium

Usage of Selenium

Very important companies in the world using Selenium for their browser-based testing, often replacing years-long efforts involving other proprietary tools. It has grown in popularity, so its requirements and challenges multiplied.

The web becomes more complicated and new technologies are added to websites,  the mission of this project to keep up with them where possible. It was an open source project,  this support is provided through the generous donation of time from many volunteers, every one of which has a “day job”.

Another mission of the project is to encourage more volunteers to participate in this effort, and build a strong community so that the project can continue to keep up with technologies with a dominant platform for functional test automation.

Single interface for all browser.

The project guiding principles is to support a common interface for all  the browser technologies. Complex Web browsers, highly engineered applications, performing  operations in different ways but which frequently look the same while doing so. Even though the text is available in the same fonts, the images are displayed in the same place and the links take you to the same destination. What is happening is as different as night and day. Selenium extract  these differences, hiding their details and intricacies from the person writing the code. This allows you to write several lines of code to perform a complicated workflow, but these same lines will execute on Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and all other supported browsers.

Selenium controlling web browsers

selenium uses the best techniques available to remotely control browser instances and emulate a user's interaction with the browser.

Selenium allows users to entering text into fields, selecting drop-down values and checking boxes, and clicking links in documents. It also providing many other controls such as mouse movement, arbitrary JavaScript execution, and much more.

Even though used primarily for front-end testing of websites, Selenium is at its core a browser user agent library. The interfaces are present to their application, which encourages composition with other libraries to suit your purpose.

Tools and Support

Selenium  minimalist design approach gives it versatility to be included as a component in bigger applications. Selenium gives you the tools to put together your own grid of browsers so tests can be run on different browsers and multiple operating systems across a range of machines.

It's an aim to help make this a reality for you, by providing users with tools and documentation to control browsers also its make it easy to scale and deploy such grids.

Testing Requirements

Selenium tests can be expensive to run. what extent depends on the browser you are  running the tests against, but historically browsers  behaviour has varied so much that it has often been a stated goal to cross-test against multiple browsers.

Selenium allowing you to run the same instructions against multiple browsers on multiple operating systems, but the enumeration of all the possible browsers, their different versions, and the many operating systems they run on will quickly become a non-trival undertaking.

Click here for more information about selenium training