WHAT IS SELENIUM?

WHAT IS SELENIUM? 
 SELENIUM is an open source web automation tool. Limitation of SELENIUM: It doesn’t support windows based application directly. However, third party tool. (E.g. AutoIT can be integrated with SELENIUM to automate windows based applications. 

1. SELENIUM community developed specific tool called WINIUM to automate windows based applications.

2. SELENIUM community also developed tools to test mobile applications,
● Selendroid - it supports only Android platform
● Appium - it supports Android platform, MAC, Windows etc.


Note: All the SELENIUM related resources and documents can be found on the below website. http://www.seleniumhq.org. Here, HQ stands for head quarter.


Why SELENIUM is so popular and demanding?
 SELENIUM is popular and demanding due to the following features.

1. it is an open source tool freely available on internet
2. No project cost involved
3. No license required
4. Can be easily customized to integrate with other Test Management tools like ALM, Bugzilla etc.
5. It supports almost 13 different software languages
● Java
● C#
● Ruby
● Python
● Perl
● Php
● Javascript
● Javascript (Node JS)
● Haskell
● R
● Dart
● TCL
● Objective – C

6. It supports almost all the browsers. (Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer etc) and hence, cross browser testing/compatibility testing can be performed using SELENIUM.

7. It supports almost all the Operating System (MAC, Windows, and LINUX etc) and hence, cross platform testing can also be performed.


Different Flavors of SELENIUM 
● SELENIUM Core (Developed by a company called Thought Works way back in 2004) 
● SELENIUM IDE (supports only Mozilla Firefox - supports record and playback feature)
● SELENIUM RC (Remote Control - Version is 1.x) (Used for parallel execution of automation scripts on multiple remote systems) 
● SELENIUM WebDriver (Version is 2.x and 3.x) 
Note: SELENIUM WebDriver version 3.x is no longer capable of running SELENIUM RC directly, rather it does through emulation and via an interface called WebDriverBackedSELENIUM. But, it does support SELENIUM Grid directly. 
SELENIUM Grid: 1. It is one of the components of SELENIUM that is used to run automation scripts on multiple systems simultaneously. 2. It is used to carry out compatibility testing on multiple browsers and platforms.

Key/Important topics of SELENIUM 
● Automation Framework - guidelines and rules to write SELENIUM code 
● GitHub - Central Repository to store code 
● Maven - build dependency tool for auto update of SELENIUM version 
● SELENIUM Grid - to test on multiple OS and browsers 
● Jenkins - Continuous Integration 
● TestNG - framework for generation of Test Reports and running multiple test scripts in one go.



Softwares required for SELENIUM? 
1. Eclipse IDE - Oxygen (Stable version) 
2. JDK 1.8
3. SELENIUM Server-Standalone-3.7.1 (Stable version) (Download it from the given URL: http://www.SELENIUMhq.org/download). 

4. Driver Executable 
❖ For Firefox Browser 
       ➢ the name of the driver executable is: geckodriver.exe 
       ➢ Url to download: https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases 
      ➢ Version 0.19 is recommended for Firefox browser with version 56.0 (SELENIUM jar - 3.7.1) 
❖ For Chrome browser 
      ➢ Name of the driver executable : chromedriver.exe 
      ➢ url to download: https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com/index.html?path=2.31/ 
      ➢ Stable version of chrome version is 62.0 (Use chromedriver.exe with version 2.33). 

5. Browsers: Firefox (Version 57.0) and Chrome (Version 62.0) 

Note: To stop auto update of Firefox browser version, Make sure to disconnect the internet connection and then install 54.0 version, now go to Setting/Option in Firefox browser and check the below checkbox - Never check for updates