Selenium WebDriver Architecture
Document Contents
Introduction
Let us get an overview of Selenium WebDriver architecture. Selenium WebDriver is an API for web automation that is easy and makes our tests easier to develop and maintain. It is an Object-oriented API that provides good support for Web Application Automation and Testing.
WebDriver is not attached to any tool and makes integration with other frameworks possible like TestNG (TDD), JBehave (BDD approach), POJO, etc.
WebDriver Architecture
Language bindings are a wrapper exposed to us to write code against. Also, this allows Webdriver API to support multiple languages and browsers as shown in the below figure. The example program Languages are Java, C#, Python, Javascript, etc. Furthermore, by using language bindings, we can invoke the browser-specific implementation of WebDriver to interact with the web application.
For example, the easiest way to download Java bindings is by using the Maven build tool. Maven will download the java bindings and all its dependencies and will create the project, using a pom.xml file.
Under the hood: JSON wire protocol
Commands issued in the code would be converted to Restful Web service request/response with JSON payload ( application/json). In addition, JSON is a popular data format with libraries for handling it available for almost every language. Also, browsers can transform a string into an object using either a straight call with primitives designed to transform a Javascript object to and from a string securely and without side-effects. Furthermore, browser driver applications will communicate with different Web browsers natively to issue commands against Web Application under Test.
For example a call to the driver.get(“https://www.bing.com”); would be mapped to a POST request to a URL encoding the session ID and ending with “/URL”, with the parameters.
POST on URL ( /session/<sessionId>/url )
{ “url”: “https://www.bing.com” }
Selenium WebDriver Tutorials on this website can be found at:
https://www.testingdocs.com/selenium-webdriver-tutorial
For more details on the Selenium, visit the official website at:
