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Selenium IDE, Selenium 1.0, Selenium 2.0, Selenium RC, Selenium GRID, Web Driver and what not... Part 2

So we have seen, Selenium IDE, Core and RC in part 1 and its time to know a new booster in the offing for Selenium. By now you would have realized that Selenium greatly suffers from its own implementation design. It uses js to drive a page and suffers from js restriction in a browser. WebDriver originated as different web testing library, which tries to employ best possible solution for a automated tests in a browser. WebDriver for Firefox is implemented as Firefox extension, while for IE it makes use of IE's automation control. When facilities offered by Browser are not enough, WebDriver makes use of Operating System offerings. For example to type in file input box. WebDriver and Selenium are being merged to offer best of both API. They can not be exported to WebDriver overnight. How about the test which are already written in Selenium and WebDriver has solution for this also. WebDriver lets you write new test using WebDriver api, while yet supporting existing Selenium test using WebDriverBackedSelenium. for java client driver. WebDriver also supports headless (without head  without browser) execution of tests. Since there would not any browser interaction in this case so these tests would be faster than tests running on actual browser. But do you really want to sacrifice browser for sake of speed of tests ?

And we are still not happy with speed of test. We want to run tests on different browsers and all at the same time. Answer is Selenium GRID. One Selenium RC can also be used to invoke multiple browsers, but it would soon exhaust system resources. Grid works with Hub > Slave concept, where one hub (Selenium RC) controls slaves (more Selenium RCs) for invoking browsers on multiple systems.

At last about Selenium 1.0 and Selenium 2.0, Selenium Remote Control is referred as Selenium 1.0 while Selenium 2.0 is referred as merged Selenium and WebDriver api, which should be future Selenium. You may want to be loyal to Selenium 1.0 before while experimenting with Selenium 2.0 at the same time...
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