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Selenium is an instrument for JavaScript web based applications automated testing.

From the beginning I was skeptical about Selenium and its possibilities. The first thing I thought when I was looking a presentation for it was – “Another tool with more restrictions than possibilities.” It was so till the day I tried it.

It really turned out that it is more than I expected. The project Selenium is divided into few subprojects.

I’m using only 2 of these projects - Selenium IDE and Selenium RC.

Selenium IDE is a plug-in for Firefox. The test scripts can be recorded quite easily with its help. Apart from recorder the plug-in can be also used to run tests themselves, as well as for their debugging (using the option for executing the test step by step). The tests are recorded in HTML and table’s elements are used for describing the test-related data.

Here is a small example for login form.

This way is indeed simple. The table consists of command, target and optional value. Besides you can export the test in your favorite programming language.
Java, C#, Perl, PHP, Ruby and Python are supported.

Here is the common part with Selenium RC. The already exported test can be easily performed by the interpreter of the corresponding programming language.
I use Java. This is how the previous example exported in JAVA looks like:

But let’s first tell something for Selenium RC. Its usage is indeed really simple. What you only need to do is to add selenium-java-client-driver.jar into class path and start the Selenium server: java – jar selenium-server.jar.

It is used as a proxy between your tests and the browsers, in order to execute the JavaScript commands against your web application. The advantage is that Selenium server detaches the test scripts from the actual code of the targeted application which makes no difference from testing perspective between production ready system and system under test.

For me it is advantageous that it can be easily integrated with the very well-known unit testing framework JUnit which provides a familiar environment for configuration and execution of the recorded tests so as a final result you have a homogeneous setup for all your types of tests including the ones created with Selenium IDE. .

Here is an example how our test will look like the following:

In SetUp method an instance of DefaultSelenium is created. In its constructor we indicate which browser we will use.

Let’s now have a look at the exported example from Selenium IDE. In it we don’t have such object so we use directly the object Selenium. In fact the object Selenium is created as a child of the class SeleneseTestCase and as a browser the OS default one is used. SeleneseTestCase inherits the TestCase class of Junit. The methods of the type verifyTrue are in fact the same as those in Junit:

However, it is preferable to define by ourselves the Selenium target and to use the methods of Junit or other unit test framework.

In conclusion I can say that Selenium is really useful tool for testing of web applications. The tests are recorded really fast and what I enjoyed a lot is they are easy for maintenance. You can execute them without any problems over the most wide-spread browsers. It’s perfect for smoke tests (I’m using it mainly for this purpose). You can make tests that only to go through all JSPs of the application (if it’s java based) in order to get away the boring waiting of the initial compilation when the server has to be restarted.

Try it, you may like it. It may work for you☺.