
Selenium 2.0: Out Now - mattyb
http://seleniumhq.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/selenium-2-0/
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npongratz
Official website here: <http://seleniumhq.org/>

For those who don't know what Selenium is (or forgot, like me), it is a system
for testing web applications. It includes the following components:

\+ Selenium IDE (Firefox add-on for creating and replaying tests) \+ Selenium
Remote Control (run tests in multiple browsers and platforms) \+ Selenium Grid
(run tests in parallel across multiple servers)

I'm not affiliated with the project, I just wanted to provide a quick intro
for those in a hurry to learn a bit about it.

~~~
anigbrowl
I often wonder why dev blogs rarely include a link to the main site. As often
as not, I have to type in the name or search on it because the blog masthead
doesn't provide any background information or navigational aids to the new
visitor.

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pivo
A couple of years ago my company was in the process of purchasing QTP, an
expensive testing product. I had suggested Selenium instead of QTP, but for
whatever reason we went with QTP.

But we couldn't afford QTP licenses for everyone who wanted or needed to use
it, so some people started writing tests in Selenium instead. Two years on,
we're getting rid of QTP and switching entirely to Selenium. We're not doing
it just cost reasons though, people just like using Selenium much more than
QTP.

Hats off to the Selenium team for such a excellent tool!

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neves
Selenium is one of the my hidden tricks to get good karma at my jobs.
Everywhere I work I find a need for Selenium and everybody thinks it is
awesome.

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3am
Looking forward to trying it out. Many, many thanks for providing such an
excellent tool. I was writing automated tests before Selenium, and it has been
a seismic change in browser automation. Between you guys, JMeter, and Robot
there really is a credible open source automated testing stack now.

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adovenmuehle
I used the 1.x versions of Selenium pretty heavily at my last job and the
JavaScript selectors could get pretty hairy (even with jQuery).

Does anyone with experience with Selenium 2.0 know how much of a boost
WebDriver gives for performance? Especially doing tests of a SPA with a lot of
AJAX could get hairy and slow.

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jasonkolb
Selenium has always been one of my favorite projects. You can tell someone has
been thru the stress-test wringer if they know its ins and outs. The newer
grid stuff looks great, although I haven't played with it yet.

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chsonnu
For those who prefer using Ruby, try the ruby bindings:

<http://rubygems.org/gems/selenium-webdriver>

Now wrap your tests in RSpec and you're good to go.

~~~
ericb
I would look at Capybara before using webdriver directly in Ruby. With
Capybara, with one line of code, you can change from using webdriver, to using
the native rack driver, or a full headless browser setup like capybara-webkit,
or akephalos for headless httpunit (which runs javascript).

<https://github.com/jnicklas/capybara>

drivers:

<https://github.com/thoughtbot/capybara-webkit>

<https://github.com/bernerdschaefer/akephalos>

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senthilnayagam
congrats guys, awesome project saving drudgery for web developers and testers
across globe

~~~
wotsrovert
I'm one of those developers.

Last summer, I took over a troubled Ruby on Rails project; the code was a
mess, overly complex and bug-ridden, lack of meaningful unit tests, and an
unhappy client.

I needed integration tests. After trying and failing with Cucumber, I switched
to Selenium IDE.

A year later, I'm very happy with Selenium. The project is turning around and
I sense the client is warming up to me.

I now use Selenium on almost all my projects.

~~~
stephth
What is it that made you fail with Cucumber and succeed with Selenium?

~~~
wotsrovert
The existing codebase, and the fact that I'm charging by the hour on a project
who's budget is 3x initial estimates.

The site was, and still is, stuck at Rails 2.1.1. And, at the time, I was not
using RVM or Bundler. Meanwhile, I was putting out fires on a daily base on a
live system.

With Cucumber, I was unable to run even a simple feature against the codebase.
I'd get an exception, fix it somehow, then get another. After 20 minutes of
that, I started looking for other options.

And on top of that, I did not know the codebase: brand new project.

The quickest path to stable ground was Selenium IDE. Just hit the record
button and start writing integration tests. I quickly gained enough confidence
to change the underlying code. And I was working within a budget of only a
couple thousand dollars a month.

What I've grown to love about Selenium, as opposed to Cucumber, is its
complete separation from the site it's testing. An integration testing
framework can take a long time to master; I'd rather 1) minimize that time, 2)
learn a tool that can be applied to as wide a variety of projects as possible.

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timxpp
Just to mention another tool: For quick regression testing I found the iMacros
for Firefox addon very easy to use: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/imacros-for-f...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/imacros-for-firefox/)

I also like its ability to read CSV files out of the box ("table driven
testing").

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jc123
Was using 2.0beta3 of Selenium2 with IphoneDriver for around 4 months and it
has been great. The quality was very good that I don't see a need to rush and
switch to the actual 2.0 release :P Great work to the team!

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fuzzylizard
Nice work and a giant Congrats to the entire Selenium team

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heyrhett
Great job guys! It seems like there is an opportunity here to build a good
testing service around selenium grid. Has anyone done that yet?

~~~
hinathan
Isn't that what Sauce Labs is all about?

~~~
timxpp
yes, and browsermob, and alertfox

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bobobjorn
great work!

