Introducing Selenium | Selenium Basics
Selenium Basics
We can define selenium as a web Automation tool used to perform testing on Web Applications and not an desktop based application. There are various tools used to automate both web applications and windows applications like QTP (Quick Test Professional). This is the main reason why most of the companies choose Selenium whenever they want to automate Web applications. The components of Selenium are,
- IDE: It is a firefox plug-in which deals with and playback mechanism. User can create simple scripts and export to selenium RC or Webdriver.
- RC: It is a tool which allows to automate web application using any of the programming language that supports.
- Webdriver: It makes direct calls to the browser using each browser’s native support for automation.
Webdriver: It was developed to better support dynamic web pages like Ajax where elements of a page may change without the page itself being reloaded. - Grid: It Is a server that allows tests to use web browser instances running on remote machines.
As a beginner, learning the selenium basics, is not that difficult, just start using Selenium IDE which is a firefox plug-in, used to record and play the script. Selenium IDE is just for practice, and you can learn how the commands that are used to run the script in IDE. But IDE itself is not enough for effective test case writing / scripting as it doesn’t support looping concepts and and you cannot customize it for your needs.