What is Selenium? What are the different Selenium components?

Answer

Selenium is one of the most popular automated testing suites. Selenium is designed in a way to support and encourage automation testing of functional aspects of web based applications and a wide range of browsers and platforms. Due to its existence in the open source community, it has become one of the most accepted tools amongst the testing professionals.

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 IDE is a record and playback tool. It is distributed as a Firefox Plugin.
• Selenium Remote Control (RC) – Selenium RC is a server that allows user to create test scripts in a desired programming language. It also allows executing test scripts within the large spectrum of browsers.
• Selenium WebDriver – WebDriver is a different tool altogether that has various advantages over Selenium RC. WebDriver directly communicates with the web browser and uses its native compatibility to automate.
• Selenium Grid – Selenium Grid is used to distribute your test execution on multiple platforms and environments concurrently.