Selenium WebDriver Introduction

Let’s get started with Selenium. Selenium WebDriver is a functional automation tool that automates web application testing.

Selenium WebDriver automates web browsers and provides a set of APIs that can be used to interact with them. These APIs allow web page navigation, click buttons, enter text into text boxes, and select options from drop-down menus.

WebDriver is cross-platform and supports a variety of operating systems and web browsers. It can automate web browser interactions on Windows, Mac, and Linux machines.

Dependencies

We need the following installed on the test machine to work on a Selenium Automation project.

Java JDK

https://www.testingdocs.com/download-and-installing-java-jdk/

IDE

https://www.testingdocs.com/downloading-and-extracting-eclipse-ide/

Download Components

Download standalone Selenium jar files, language bindings, browser drivers, and plugins.

We can specify the Maven dependencies for working with Selenium in an automation project.

 

 

Download URL

• https://www.selenium.dev/downloads/

Browser Drivers

Selenium uses browser drivers specific to each web browser to establish a secure connection with the web browser. Selenium WebDriver supports multiple web browsers to test and run web applications on the browsers.

Some supported browser drivers are as follows:

• Mozilla GeckoDriver
• Google Chrome Driver
• Opera Driver
• Microsoft Edge Driver
• Safari Driver
• HtmlUnitDriver

JSON wire protocol

The JSON wire protocol provides a transport mechanism for transferring data between servers and clients. It is the industry standard for various Restful web services.

Selenium Test Scripts

To use Selenium WebDriver, we must first install the appropriate driver for its web browser. Once the driver is installed, we can start writing selenium test scripts. Selenium test script is the test code written in any programming language the driver interprets. Selenium test scripts are written in various programming languages, like Java, Python, C#, and Ruby. The syntax for writing test scripts varies depending on the programming language.