Components of Selenium

Selenium is not just a single tool but a suite of products. It has four components—Selenium IDE, Selenium Grid, Web Driver and Selenium RC. Selenium RC and Web Driver have been merged to form a framework known as Selenium 2.

Selenium IDE: Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It was developed by Shinya Kasatani. It allows you to use Selenium Core without having to copy it onto the server.

Selenium Core is a JavaScript module that allows Selenium to drive the browser. It can interact with Document Object Model (DOM) using JavaScript calls. Scripts are recorded in Selenese, a special scripting language for Selenium. It provides commands for performing actions in Web browsers and for retrieving data from multiple pages.

Selenium RC: This is a server written in Java, which accepts commands for the browser via HTTP. It makes it possible to write the tests for Web applications in any programming language. When using Selenium, a core user has to install the whole application under test alongwith the Web server on the local computer. So a server has been created by an engineer named Paul Hammant, which acts as a proxy to trick the browser into considering the Selenium core and Web application that is being tested as coming from the same domain. This is known as Selenium RC (remote control) or Selenium 1.

Selenium Web Driver: This is the successor to Selenium RC. It is the first cross-platform framework for testing that controls the browser from the OS level. It was created by Simon Stewart in 2006. It accepts commands,