Selenium Driver

[Eddie]

Interesting video from Google conference. A few questions:

1. Is there a Selenium implementation of the WebDriver? Seems like
this would provide access to any browser Selenium supports.
2. What's a good source for other design patterns (other than
PageObject) for web testing?
3. Is IE 8.0 supported?

[Simon Stewart]

Hi Eddie!

Right now, there's no implementation of WebDriver backed by Selenium.
This is one of the things that will need to be done before we can
release Selenium 2.0, but it's not started yet. Right now, my focus is
fleshing out the existing drivers before taking on more work, but if
anyone out there wants to help, I'd be happy to offer support :)

I'm not sure of many good resources for web testing design patterns,
but the general rules of thumb I follow are the DRY[1] principal and
to make the intent of a test clear. If you're interested, things like
model-based testing are interesting, as are applying DSLs[2] and/or
strong OO to your tests. That's not a very helpful answer, but
hopefully there's enough to get you started

As for IE 8 support, I've not tested it explicitly, but it should work
--- the interfaces that the IE driver uses have been pretty stable
over the various releases. It should go without saying that WebDriver
should fully support IE 8, so if you find that it falls over horribly,
it'd be nice to know :) FWIW, Firefox 3 is already supported to the
same level as Firefox 2.

Regards,

Simon

[Eddie]

Thanks for the quick response. A few follow up questions if you don't
mind:

1. How do your proposed design patterns compare to the patterns
proposed in the GTAC 07 talk entitled "Building a Flexible &
Extensible Framework Around Selenium"? Specifically, do you wrap
UIObjects? How does your PageObject differ from their BaseClient
class?
2. Do you have a sense of how difficult it would be to write a
Selenium driver for WebDriver? JWebUnit was mentioned in the Q&A
portion of your talk as a competitor; however, JWebUnit 2.0 (which
proposed the Selenium plugin) was never finalized due to fundamental
mismatches between JWebUnit and Selenium behavior. Any idea if your
framework would suffer similar problems? Note that JWebUnit
development appears to have halted.

Thanks.

On Mar 20, 11:04 am, "Simon Stewart" <simon.m.stew...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Eddie!
>
> Right now, there's no implementation of WebDriver backed by Selenium.
> This is one of the things that will need to be done before we can
> release Selenium 2.0, but it's not started yet. Right now, my focus is
> fleshing out the existing drivers before taking on more work, but if
> anyone out there wants to help, I'd be happy to offer support :)
>
> I'm not sure of many good resources for web testing design patterns,
> but the general rules of thumb I follow are the DRY[1] principal and
> to make the intent of a test clear. If you're interested, things like
> model-based testing are interesting, as are applying DSLs[2] and/or
> strong OO to your tests. That's not a very helpful answer, but
> hopefully there's enough to get you started
>
> As for IE 8 support, I've not tested it explicitly, but it should work
> --- the interfaces that the IE driver uses have been pretty stable
> over the various releases. It should go without saying that WebDriver
> should fully support IE 8, so if you find that it falls over horribly,
> it'd be nice to know :) FWIW, Firefox 3 is already supported to the
> same level as Firefox 2.
>
> Regards,
>
> Simon
>

[Simon Stewart]

Hi Eddie,

I'll need to go back and take another look at the presentation you
mention, but I'll reply properly to that point once I've watched it
again.

The Selenium driver for WebDriver should be possible. There will
probably be some trade-offs:

* The hardest piece will be handling the basic navigation of the DOM
that the WebElement offers
* A simple implementation of WebElement would "re-find" the element
with each call, which is different from how WebDriver normally works

Neither of these are insurmountable challenges. One of the interesting
things that gives me confidence is that the capabilities of WebDriver
have been partly shaped by the implementation of the WebDriver-backed
Selenium implementation --- if it works one way, it should hopefully
be possible to go the other way too. Also in our favour is the fact
that WebDriver will be becoming part of the Selenium 2.0 effort. It'll
be good to work with the other Selenium devs on making the
Selenium-backed WebDriver implementation work.

Regards,

Simon