ItsAllEasy

So, as you might have guessed by my previous post, I’ve been playing with selenium more and more of late. I totally forgot about my JSUnit + Selenium + JUnit post! Since then, Selenium was split into 2 parts: Selenium Core and Selenium Remote Control (Selenium RC). Selenium RC is really nice. As I suspected, it removes the need for the SocketBasedCommandProcessor I had written.

In short, RC comes with a server-side component that acts as the host for the selenium code as well as a proxy. When you connect to it (using the selenium-driver client: DefaultSelenium) and tell it to launch a browser, the server will configure the browser to use the server as a proxy…then open up the browser to [url of app under test]/selenium-driver/SeleneseRunner.html. Since the server itself is acting as the browser’s proxy it will handle all requests for /selenium-driver/* directly and let all other requests go where they were intended to. This makes the browser think that the selenium code is sitting right along-side the application under test and side-steps the same-origin-policy. Pretty Sweet.

With Selenium RC you can have completely separate Test Projects. The application under test doesn’t need to have a single reference or artifact of selenium in it. You could also use it to write automated scripts that will do some task on a website. For example, you could probably write a simple Swing-based wordpress publishing tool…then write your posts in it…and click ‘Post’…then it would login to your site and publish the post for you.

I’m presenting tonight at the Gateway JUG on “Web Acceptance Testing with Selenium”. My slides are up here. If you want to know more about Selenium you should come…or just check out their site if you can’t make it to the meeting