Selenium is not just a single tool or a utility, rather a package of several testing tools and for the same reason it is referred to as a Suite. Each of these tools is designed to cater different testing and test environment requirements.
The suite package constitutes of the following sets of tools:
- Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
- Selenium Remote Control (RC)
- Selenium WebDriver
- Selenium Grid
What is Selenium IDE?
Selenium IDE was developed by Shinya Kasatani. While studying Selenium Core, he realized that this JavaScript code can be extended to create an integrated development environment (IDE) which can be plugged into Mozilla Firefox.
Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium scripts. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run in.
Selenium IDE is not only a recording tool: it is a complete IDE. You can choose to use its recording capability, or you may edit your scripts by hand. With autocomplete support and the ability to move commands around quickly, Selenium IDE is the ideal environment for creating Selenium tests no matter what style of tests you prefer.
Feature of Selenium IDE
- Easy record and playback
- Intelligent field selection will use IDs, names, or XPath as needed
- Autocomplete for all common Selenium commands
- Walk through tests
- Debug and set breakpoints
- Save tests as HTML, Ruby, Python, C# scripts, or any other format
- Support for Selenium user-extensions.js file
- Option to automatically assert the title of every page
- NEW! Easy customization through plug-ins
Limitation: One thing is to note that Selenium IDE supports only Mozilla Firefox web browser. Being a Firefox plug-in, Selenium IDE supports only Firefox, thus the created test scripts could be executed only on Firefox. A few more loopholes make this tool inappropriate to be used for complex test scripts. Thus, other tools like Selenium RC, WebDriver comes into the picture.
Benefit: The most impressive aspect of using selenium IDE is that the user is not required to possess any prior programming knowledge. The minimum that the user needs is the little acquaintances with HTML, DOMS, and JavaScript to create numerous test scripts using this tool.
