Web application testing company Sauce Labs has introduced support for the popular Selenium 2 web app software testing framework as part of its cloud application testing service. Selenium 2 is the result of collaboration in the Selenium community to integrate the WebDriver automated testing project with the Selenium project.
With over four million downloads in just four years, the Selenium project continues to gather momentum. Advances in Selenium 2 allow Selenium to work more tightly with browsers, offering high-fidelity emulation of interactions, such as clicking and typing, so developers can ensure the performance of their web applications across the diverse base of browsers in use today.
"The focus of Selenium 2 has been our users. When your Selenium tests pass, you can be confident that your applications will work for your users," said Simon Stewart, original creator of WebDriver and senior software engineer in the test division at Google. "I'm extremely pleased to see Sauce Labs carry this attention to the user from the open source project to their Sauce OnDemand service. Also, it's extremely cool to have a video of each and every test that is run!"
Key advances in Selenium 2 include support for iPhone and Android testing — a built-in Android and iPhone emulator allows developers and QA teams to expand their use of Selenium and support the growing demand for mobile applications. There is also a new API — which means that in theory Selenium 2 should be more developer friendly and conceptually simpler because it directs users to focus on only two basic objects: WebDriver (browsers) and WebElements (anything on a web page) to construct tests.
"Selenium provides API libraries for most modern programming languages. In Selenium 2, every API library has been tailored to each programming language for easier usability. The new version 2 offering makes it feasible to test web applications without the overhead and workarounds that the first evolution of Selenium necessitated," said Julian Simpson, principal consultant at The Build Doctor. "Selenium 2 is a significant advancement for application testing because it moves beyond some of the previous challenges in Selenium 1's architecture and provides a stable base for enhancing the entire tool chain."
