Selenium is a very popular open-source tool that is widely used for automating tests in web browsers, which means that you can only test web applications with Selenium. It is not possible to test desktop applications (software) or any mobile applications with Selenium. But, Selenium dominates the world of Automation Testing. But the question that hits everyone’s mind is: why?
Selenium for beginners is open source, so there are no licensing costs. That doesn’t seem like much, but it’s a huge advantage over many other testing tools.
Components of Selenium Suite
Selenium Suite consists the following four components-
- Selenium IDE – Selenium IDE is a recording and playback automation tool that we can use to automate web applications. It is coming in the form of a Chrome and Firefox browser extension.
As it works on the principle of recording and playback, it is the automation tool of the first choice for people with no or limited programming language experience.
- Selenium RC – Selenium Remote Control (RC) is officially discontinued by Selenium. It was used to put the javascript code into the browser for automation and needed an additional server to run the automation scripts.
Other than that, it had a lot of limitations like – it was slow, it didn’t have a headless browser such as HtmlUnitDriver, and the server had to be started before the test scripts were run.
- Selenium WebDriver – It is the most important component of the Selenium Suite. It offers different drivers for different browsers and supports many programming languages.
It is completely object-oriented and supports all popular browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari, etc. and scripting can be performed in many popular languages such as – Java, Python, Ruby, etc.
- Selenium Grid – Selenium Grid is also the most important part of the Selenium Suite. It helps with the distributed running of Selenium tests in parallel on several remote machines.
It contains a hub and multiple nodes. The nodes run the Selenium instances on which the test cases run. These nodes are connected to a central hub that acts as a server and controls all test execution.
Advantages of using the Selenium
Selenium for beginners is very beneficial, some main advantages are as following:
- Tests can be performed in any operating system like Windows, Mac or Linux
- Tests can be performed with many browsers such as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, or Opera
- It can be integrated with various tools such as TestNG & JUnit for test case management and report generation
- It can be integrated with Maven, Jenkins & Docker to enable continuous testing
- Many programming languages like Java, Python, C #, PHP, Ruby, Perl & .Net are used to write the test cases. But out of all these languages, Java is the most widely used language.
What is Selenium WebDriver?
Selenium Webdriver is one of the most generally used tools for automating web applications. It automates the web browsers by directly calling their native method, as opposed to Selenium RC which injects Javascript into browsers for automation. Therefore, Webdriver is much faster than Selenium RC.
Other than this, Selenium WebDriver can also handle scenarios such as alerts, pop-ups, Ajax requests, keyboard and mouse actions without any difficulties. Since Webdriver calls the methods of various web browsers directly, we have a separate driver for every browser. Selenium is the most popular tool in the field of automation testing, while Java, on the other hand, is the most widely used programming language on the market nowadays. Both technologies together form a perfect combination for test automation. In this article, we’ll give you a complete overview of why you should use Java for Selenium.
Why Java? In the next section of this article, I’ll tell you the reasons why Java with selenium is the most popular language for automation.
Why prefer Selenium with Java?
Java is the most heavily used programming language for Selenium in the world. Selenium with Java is preferred by more than 80% of the experts.
Following we have listed down the different reasons for using Java for Selenium:
- Because Java is the most widely used language in the whole IT industry, there is a huge community that supports it along with a huge pool of references.
- Almost 77% of Selenium testers use Java, which makes knowledge sharing very easy and fast.
- Java has been around for ages, which is why there are a variety of readily available frameworks, plugins, APIs, and libraries that support Java for test automation.
- Java uses JVM, which makes it a platform-independent language. In other words, you can use it in any of the Operating environments where the JVM is installed.
- Because Java is statically typed, the Java IDEs give a lot of feedback on errors that can occur while coding.
Now this gives you enough reasons to understand the popularity behind the preference of Selenium with Java.
What needs to learn for Selenium with Java?
If you want to use Java for Selenium, you will require a brief knowledge of the Java basics, starting with:
- What is Java?
- Data Types
- Keywords
- Operators
- Access Modifiers
- Methods
- Control Statements
- Iterative Statements
- for
- while
- do-while
- for each
- Selection Statements
- if
- if-else
- switch
- Iterative Statements
- Arrays
- Strings
- Regular Expressions
- Packages
- Objects and Classes
- Constructors
- OOPs Concepts
- Inheritance
- Abstraction
- Encapsulation
- Polymorphism
- Exception Handling
Why Developers Prefer Selenium With Java?
A great developer community that creates documentation and solves problems has helped Java become the language of preference among application developers. Therefore, writing selenium test cases with Java has a huge number of advantages:
- Selenium supports Java. that’s why esters can use the active community of contributors and detailed documentation to write test cases
- Programs written in Java are quicker than many other popular languages such as Python
- Java is used more often in commercial applications than other programming languages such as Python and therefore integration of Selenium tests is easier.
