Post#4.Different Components in Selenium

Components available in the Selenium suite

Selenium IDE

Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a Firefox plugin that lets testers to record their actions as they follow the workflow that they need to test.

Selenium RC

Selenium Remote Control (RC) was the flagship testing framework that allowed more than simple browser actions and linear execution. It makes use of the full power of programming languages such as Java, C#, PHP, Python, Ruby, and PERL to create more complex tests.

Selenium RC's architecture

You first need to launch a separate application called Selenium Remote Control (RC) Server before you can start testing.

Ø  Selenium RC Server "injects" a Javascript program called Selenium Core into the browser.

Ø  Once injected, Selenium Core will start receiving instructions from the RC Server from your test program.

Ø  When the instructions are received, Selenium Core will execute them as Javascript commands.

Ø  The browser will execute the instructions of Selenium Core, and will relay its response to the RC Server.

Ø  RC Server will fetch the next instruction from your test script to repeat the whole cycle.

Selenium WebDriver

Selenium WebDriver is the successor to Selenium RC which sends commands directly to the browser and retrieves results.

WebDriver in selenium is an Interface and it is designed to overcome some limitations of selenium RC.

Selenium WebDriver is also known as Selenium 2.

Selenium 2 supports most of all browsers to run your test cases and many programming languages like C#, Java, Python, Ruby, .Net, Perl, PHP, etc.. to create and modify your test scripts.

WebDriver's architecture

Ø  Selenium WebDriver does not require selenium server for running test.

Ø  It controls the browser from the OS level

Ø  All you need are your programming language's IDE (which contains your Selenium commands-e.g. Eclipse) and a browser.

Selenium Grid

Selenium Grid is a tool used to run parallel tests across different machines and different browsers simultaneously which results in minimized execution time.