What is Selenium?

Selenium is an open source technology for automating the user interactions of browser-based applications. Since it’s an open source tool there would not be any vendor support, reliability issues can also pop up. In browser based applications also all features are not automatable like Captcha’s, Barcode reading etc. Desktop or mobile based applications cannot be automated directly using Selenium. Selenium has three components the Selenium IDE, which is a record and play back tool and its currently deprecated.  The Selenium Webdriver , which is the most powerful and current tool and The Selenium Grid, which is used to distribute the execution load across multiple systems to support parallel testing.  Selenium doesn’t come with many features which a traditional automation tool has like execution engine, reporting mechanism, methods for reading from excel, methods for reading property file etc. Selenium integrates with third parties to overcome these limitations.   Selenium integrate with TestNG, JUnit or java main() for the execution part. But java main() is not preferred as it won’t support reporting and many other features which the third parties provide.  When it comes to reporting ExtentAPI or XSLT Report are the available options for integration. For reading data from an external source Apache POI or JExcel are the preferred ones for reading data from an excel sheet and need to depend on java.util.Properties for ‘properties’ file.