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Introduction
Selenium is a set of tools for automating browsers. It is largely used for testing applications, but its usages are not limited only to testing. It can also be used for screen scraping and automating repetitive tasks in a browser window. Selenium supports automation on all the major browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera. Selenium WebDriver is now a part of W3C standards and is supported by major browser vendors.
Selenium offers the following set of tools for automating interaction with browsers:
• Selenium IDE: This is a Firefox add-in used to record and play back the Selenium scripts with Firefox. It provides a graphical user interface to record user actions using Firefox. It is a great tool to start learning and using Selenium, but it can only be used with Firefox and other browsers are not supported. However, it can convert the recorded scripts into various programming languages supported by Selenium WebDriver, which supports running scripts on browsers other than Firefox.
• Selenium WebDriver: This is a programming interface for developing advanced Selenium scripts using programming languages. We can also run tests on multiple browsers that are supported by Selenium on multiple operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. This makes Selenium a true cross-browser testing tool. Selenium WebDriver offers client libraries in various languages, including Java, C#, Python, Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript, and are more into writing test scripts.
• Selenium standalone server: This is also known as Selenium Grid and allows remote and distributed execution of Selenium scripts created with WebDriver. We can also use the grid feature of the standalone server to run tests in parallel, including tests on mobile platforms such as Android or Apple iOS for iPhone and iPad
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Selenium WebDriver and Python
Chapter 2, Writing Tests Using unittest
Chapter 3, Finding Elements
Chapter 4, Using the Selenium Python API for Element Interaction
Chapter 5, Synchronizing Tests
Chapter 6, Cross-browser Testing
Chapter 7, Testing on Mobile
Chapter 8, Page Objects and Data-driven Testing
Chapter 9, Advanced Techniques of Selenium WebDriver
Chapter 10, Integration with Other Tools and Frameworks
Who this book is for
If you are a quality assurance/testing professional, software developer, or web application developer using Python and want to learn Selenium WebDriver to automate browsers for testing your web applications, this is the perfect guide for you to get started! As a prerequisite, this book expects you to have a basic understanding of the Python programming language, although any previous knowledge of Selenium WebDriver is not needed. By the end of this book, you will have acquired a comprehensive knowledge of Selenium WebDriver, which will help you in writing your automation tests.
