So what is Selenium WebDriver?

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What is Selenium WebDriver?

• It is a browser automation framework that accepts commands and sends them to a browser.
• It controls the browser by directly communicating with it.

How do you use it?

• First, the user writes tests in an IDE, using the language-specific client provided API of their choice.
• Then the build code will communicate with Selenium.
• The server will forward the user commands to the browser-specific driver, such as the Chrome Driver for Google Chrome, or Gecko Driver for Firefox.
• The browser driver launches the browser to perform the commands and then returns a response.

Selenium Diagram from BlazeMeter

What’s great about it?

• It’s free and open source.
• Binding is available for many languages, like Java, C#, Ruby, Python & Groovy, NodeJS.
• Supports all operating systems.
• Can be easily integrated with Gradle and Maven.
• Can be integrated with CI tools like Jenkins.