New features in Selenium 0.3

A new version of the Selenium Web app test tool has just been released by Jason Huggins and the rest of the team at ThoughtWorks. I'll highlight some of the new and updated features.

New TestRunner look and feel

The most striking feature in version 0.3 is a new and improved look for the TestRunner. Click here for a screenshot.


Simplified directory structure

Another important improvement is a much simplified directory structure for the Selenium package. The main Selenium package contains the 'BrowserBot' JavaScript engine and nothing else. All the other language-specific drivers/bindings are available for download separately.

Here's all you need to do to get started with Selenium 0.3:

1. Download selenium-0.3.0.zip from the download page
2. Unzip the archive. This will create a directory called selenium-0.3.0, with 2 sub-directories: doc and selenium
3. Copy the selenium directory somewhere where it can be served by the Web server hosting your Web app
4. Open http://www.yourwebserver.com/selenium/TestRunner.html -- you will see a screen similar to the screenshot above
5. Start tinkering with the default test suite shipped with Selenium.

To add your own test suite, create an HTML file containing a table with links to your tests:

Custom Test Suite

Test1

Save this file as CustomTestSuite.html in the tests subdirectory of the selenium directory.

In the table above, Test1 is a link to the actual test file, which is another HTML file (called Test1.html) containing your custom test table. To have Selenium run your custom test suite, pass a ‘test’ parameter to TestRunner.html by opening an URL such as this:

http://www.yourwebserver.com/selenium/
TestRunner.html?test=./tests/CustomTestSuite.html
(note: this is a single line)

Improved browser support

In addition to Firefox/Mozilla on Windows/Linux/Mac OS X and IE on Windows, Selenium now supports Konqueror on Linux. There is also experimental support for Safari on Mac OS X.

Standalone server for win32 platforms

A standalone server is available for win32 platforms. This used to be known as the 'Twisted Server' implementation of Selenium, but now the fact that it is based on Twisted is hidden behind the scenes, so that new users don't have to jump through the various hoops of installing Python/Twisted/etc.

The main advantage of using the standalone version of Selenium is that it provides a workaround for the JavaScript 'same origin policy' security limitation. The same origin policy aims to prevent Cross-Site-Scripting attacks by preventing documents or scripts loaded from one origin from getting or setting properties of a document from a different origin. The net effect of all this is that in order to be able to use Selenium to test your Web application, you need to deploy the Selenium engine/framework on the server hosting the AUT (application under test). With the standalone Selenium server, you don't have this limitation and you can start doing what all new users to Selenium seem to want to do: test Google searches :-)

For users on non-Windows platforms, the Twisted Server version is still available via Subversion. See my previous blog entry for a tutorial on using the Twisted Server version. Many concepts discussed in there still apply to the standalone server version, in particular how to compose special URLs for testing 3rd party Web sites.

Plone Product version available for download

While Selenium has been available as a Plone Product version for quite some time, it was never part of the 'official' download page. Now you can find it among the Selenium 0.3 downloads as selenium-0.3.0-python-plone.zip.

For details on using Selenium with Plone, see 2 of my tutorials: part 1 and part 2.

Finally, here is a screen recording movie in AVI format that shows Selenium in action (note: choose 'Full screen' in your media player for better resolution.) The test run goes in 'Walk' mode through a new user registration test in a default, out-of-the-box installation of Plone. Enjoy!