Web site testing: Selenium 2 and WebDriver

One of my new projects (watch this space ...) has a simple web interface. Currently, it's so simple that I can test it by hand after running PyUnit tests on the underlying library, but I have a long list of features I want to add, so I started to think about web testing.

The range of frameworks for web testing is bewildering, but relatively few of them work with AJAX, and AJAX is too important to ignore. It's clear that Selenium is one of the most important of the browser-based frameworks that support AJAX. I tried it over a year ago, and while it's clearly powerful I never bonded with the HTML table based approach to writing tests. The programmatic approach of Selenium RC seemed like an improvement, but I didn't get a chance to work with it.

Recently, I looked at what was happening in the Selenium world, and I found this one year old blog post by Simon Stewart at Google. It described WebDriver, an alternate approach to programmatic web testing, and the fact that WebDriver and Selenium were to be merged into Selenium 2. Indeed, Selenium 2 has been in Alpha since late 2009 and 2.0 Alpha 4 was released on April 22 -- the downloads are here.

While Python bindings don't seem to be available yet, I downloaded the Java bindings and was writing useful tests within an hour. I'll write more about this in the future, but in the meantime here are some links to examples and comments:

• From the SeleniumExamples blog
• The official "5 Minute Getting Started Guide"
• Virtually all of the posts at The Automated Tester blog