Selenium WebDriver: Selenium and it’s History

What is Selenium?

Selenium is a free (open source) automated testing suite for web applications across different browsers and platforms.

Selenium is not just a single tool but a suite of software's, each catering to different testing needs of an organization. It has four components.

Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
Selenium Remote Control (RC)
WebDriver
Selenium Grid

Selenium Core

The story starts in 2004 at ThoughtWorks in Chicago, with Jason Huggins building the Core mode as "JavaScriptTestRunner“. Its JavaScript program that would automatically control the browser's actions.
Jason Huggins
“JavaScriptTestRunner” was later named as “Selenium Core” and released into the market as an Open Source tool.

This Open Source tool started gaining demand in the market and people started using it for automating the repeated tasks in their Web Applications.

Selenium Remote Control

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. To resolve this another ThoughtWork's engineer, Paul Hammant created system (in 2007) known as the Selenium Remote Control or Selenium 1.

Selenium 1 = Selenium IDE + Selenium RC + Selenium Grid

Paul Hammant

Selenium Grid


Patrick Lightbody to address the need of minimizing test execution times as much as possible, So he created Selenium Grid. Basically grid is for parallel execution and execute your test scripts on multiple environments.

Patrick Lightbody
Using “Selenium Grid”, testers were able to distribute the tests across multiple machines and get them executed them on different machines over their network to reduce or minimize the time taken for overall execution of tests.

Selenium IDE

“Shinya Kasatani”, who developed a Firefox extension named as “Selenium IDE”.

“Selenium IDE” using its record and playback feature, records the automation tests like recording a video and executes the recorded tests like playing the recorded videos.
Shinya Kasatani
Selenium WebDriver

Earlier Selenium 1 used to be the major project of Selenium.

Selenium 1 = Selenium IDE + Selenium RC + Selenium Grid

Later Selenium Team has decided to merge both Selenium WebDriver and Selenium RC to form a more powerful Selenium tool.

They both got merged to form “Selenium 2”

“Selenium WebDriver” was the core of “Selenium 2” and “Selenium RC” used to run in maintenance mode.

Hence Selenium 2 = Selenium IDE + Selenium WebDriver 2.x + Selenium Grid.

“Selenium 2” released on July 8, 2011.

Selenium team has decided to completely remove the dependency for Selenium RC.

After 5 years, “Selenium 3" was released on October 13, 2016 with a major change, which is the original Selenium Core implementation and replacing it with one backed by WebDriver and lot more improvements.

Hence Selenium 3 = Selenium IDE + Selenium WebDriver 3.x + Selenium Grid.

After 3 years from it’s a major release, now Selenium has put out its first alpha version of Selenium 4 on Apr 24, 2019. Still, there is no official announcement about the release date of Selenium 4, but we are expecting it around October 2019. Till that there can be several alpha or beta versions released time to time with stabilization.

To get more details please watch below youtube video and Subscribe the channel.


No comments:

Post a Comment