Introduction to Selenium Webdriver

Selenium Webdriver

WebDriver is a tool for automating testing web applications, and in particular to verify that they work as expected. It aims to provide a friendly API that’s easy to explore and understand, easier to use than the Selenium-RC (1.0) API, which will help make your tests easier to read and maintain. It’s not tied to any particular test framework, so it can be used equally well in a unit testing or from a plain old “main” method. This section introduces WebDriver’s API and helps get you started becoming familiar with it. Start by setting up a Webdriver project if you haven’t already. This was described in the previous section, Setting Up a Selenium-WebDriver Project.

Once your project is set up, you can see that WebDriver acts just as any normal library: it is entirely self-contained, and you usually don’t need to remember to start any additional processes or run any installers before using it, as opposed to the proxy server with Selenium-RC. Note: additional steps are required to use Chrome Driver, Opera Driver, Android Driver and iPhone Driver.