itsalleasy

So, as you might have guessed by my previous post, I’ve been playing with selenium more and more of late. I totally forgot about my JSUnit + Selenium + JUnit post! Since then, Selenium was split into 2 parts: Selenium Core and Selenium Remote Control (Selenium RC). Selenium RC is really nice. As I suspected, it removes the need for the SocketBasedCommandProcessor I had written.

In short, RC comes with a server-side component that acts as the host for the selenium code as well as a proxy. When you connect to it (using the selenium-driver client: DefaultSelenium) and tell it to launch a browser, the server will configure the browser to use the server as a proxy…then open up the browser to [url of app under test]/selenium-driver/SeleneseRunner.html. Since the server itself is acting as the browser’s proxy it will handle all requests for /selenium-driver/* directly and let all other requests go where they were intended to. This makes the browser think that the selenium code is sitting right along-side the application under test and side-steps the same-origin-policy. Pretty Sweet.

With Selenium RC you can have completely separate Test Projects. The application under test doesn’t need to have a single reference or artifact of selenium in it. You could also use it to write automated scripts that will do some task on a website. For example, you could probably write a simple Swing-based wordpress publishing tool…then write your posts in it…and click ‘Post’…then it would login to your site and publish the post for you.