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About Selenium


Let's start with a basic information about Selenium.

Selenium:

It is basically a tool or framework that is used to automate web browsers. By using selenium you can automate a lots of web browsers like Firefox, IE, Chrome etc. 

It is possibly most widely used open source solution. Selenium is basically a set of different tools with different purpose and role. E.g.
  • Selenium IDE
  • Selenium 1 (Selenium RC)
  • Selenium 2 ( Selenium Webdriver)
  • Selenium-Grid
Selenium webdriver is the one which we will be using during this course. It supports following browsers:
  • Google Chrome
  • Internet Explorer
  • Firefox
  • Safari
  • Opera
  • HtmlUnit
  • phantomjs
  • Android
  • iOS
So, it is the one that allows you to automate these web browsers. If we talk little bit technically, then it is basically an API for web browsers. Using this you can program web browsers in a way that you want them to do.

If you want to learn more about selenium then you can go through this link.

Architecture for Selenium WebDriver:




You don't actually have to bother about what exactly this architecture depicts, but you should at least have a general idea of how it works.

As from above diagram you can see that selenium web driver API lies between browser drivers and language bindings. 

Each browser driver knows how to interact with respective browser elements. Selenium web driver sends commands to these driver servers which in turn executes the commands and sends back the result. 

Language bindings are just the implementations in various languages that can be used for automation. 

So, we have a common API with common set of commands and we have various bindings for different languages. These bindings communicate with the common API i.e. web driver API.


In my next post I will be explaining you how to setup environment for developing automation framework in selenium, so keep in touch.



Thanks for reading this post. See you in next post. Cya!








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