Hands-On Selenium WebDriver with Java

Chapter 1. A Primer on Selenium

Selenium is an open source suite composed of a set of libraries and tools that enable the automation of web browsers. We can see Selenium as an umbrella project with three core components: WebDriver, Grid, and IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Selenium WebDriver is a library that allows the driving of browsers programmatically. Thus, we can use Selenium WebDriver to navigate websites and interact with web pages (e.g., clicking on links, filling in forms, etc.) as a real user would do, in an automated fashion. The primary use of Selenium WebDriver is the automated testing of web applications. Other Selenium uses include the automation of web-based administration tasks or web scraping (automated web data extraction).

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the Selenium core components: WebDriver, Grid, and IDE. Then, it reviews the Selenium ecosystem, i.e., other tools and technologies around it. Finally, it analyzes the foundations of software testing related to Selenium.

Selenium Core Components

Jason Huggins and Paul Hammant created Selenium in 2004 while working in Thoughtworks. They chose the name “Selenium” as a counterpart to Mercury, an existing testing framework developed by Hewlett-Packard. The name is significant because the chemical selenium is known for reducing the toxicity of mercury.

That initial version of Selenium (known today as Selenium Core) is a JavaScript library that impersonates user actions in web applications. ...