Introduction of Selenium

Selenium is one of the most popular open-source automated testing Tools available today.

Selenium automates web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that.

Introducing Selenium: Selenium is not a single tool, instead it is a set of different tools each with a different approach to support test automation. Learning all the tools will give you different options for approaching different test automation problems.These tools when used together give many options for locating the UI elements and comparing expected test results against actual application behavior. The following  are the four tools that comprise the Selenium's Tools Suite:

• Selenium IDE 
• Selenium 1 (or Selenium RC) 
• Selenium 2 (or Selenium WebDriver) 
• Selenium-Grid 

Selenium is an open source tool i.e. Unlike the proprietary tools its available free of cost.

Who developed Selenium?

Since Selenium is a collection of different tools, it had different developers as well. Below are the key persons who made notable contributions to the Selenium Project

Primarily, Selenium was created by Jason Huggins in 2004. An engineer at ThoughtWorks, he was working on a web application that required frequent testing. Having realized that the repetitious manual testing of their application was becoming more and more inefficient, he created a JavaScript program that would automatically control the browser's actions. He named this program as the "JavaScriptTestRunner."

 

eeing potential in this idea to help automate other web applications, he made JavaScriptRunner open-source which was later re-named as Selenium Core.

 

Selenium Remote Control (Selenium RC):

Unfortunately; testers using Selenium Core had to install the whole application under test and the web server on their own local computers because of the restrictions imposed by the same origin policy. So another ThoughtWork's engineer, Paul Hammant, decided to create a server that will act as an HTTP proxy to "trick" the browser into believing that Selenium Core and the web application being tested come from the same domain. This system became known as the Selenium Remote Control or Selenium 1.

Selenium Grid:

elenium Grid was developed by Patrick Lightbody to address the need of minimizing test execution times as much as possible. He initially called the system "Hosted QA." It was capable of capturing browser screenshots during significant stages, and also of sending out Selenium commands to different machines simultaneously.

Selenium IDE:

Shinya Kasatani of Japan created Selenium IDE, a Firefox extension that can automate the browser through a record-and-playback feature. He came up with this idea to further increase the speed in creating test cases. He donated Selenium IDE to the Selenium Project in 2006.

WebDriver:

Simon Stewart created WebDriver circa 2006 when browsers and web applications were becoming more powerful and more restrictive with JavaScript programs like Selenium Core. It was the first cross-platform testing framework that could control the browser from the OS level.

Selenium 2:

In 2008, the whole Selenium Team decided to merge WebDriver and Selenium RC to form a more powerful tool  called Selenium 2, with WebDriver being the core. Currently, Selenium RC is still being developed but only in maintenance mode. Most of the Selenium Project's efforts are now focused on Selenium 2.