In today’s era, people use Selenide tool over Selenium Web Driver tool. Selenide is a framework which is developed for test automation using Selenium Web Driver. Its API is too good to connect with Selenium Web Driver.
Selenium has a great library for operating a web browser, so it is just a web browser automation tool. Selenium web driver support Cross Browser Automation, Mobile browser, and native app automation also. It will help us to open the browser and copy (imitate) the user actions. It has low-level API’s.
Web Driver is the best tool, but it’s not a testing tool. Selenium Web Driver has several testing libraries, but they do not resolve the following problems:
1. UI Tests- Ideally, we write unit test cases, functional test cases, and integration test cases etc. for our applications. In the case of web application, we write scripts which open the page in the new browser and start clicking on buttons.
2. Ajax and Timeouts- The tests scripts we write today can use tomorrow, next week, and next month but sometimes the tests scripts will fail because of the CI server. Sometimes JavaScript gets slowly; some Ajax requests take a long time; and some another process also run at the same time with our tests scripts, which occupied the server CPU space.
To overcome the above problem we use “sleep” or “wait_until” methods in our test. But we cannot use these methods regularly. Ideally, when we write tests, then our main focus should be on business logic without the need to bother about timeouts, waiting, sleeping, WebDriver lifecycle, etc.
A selenide is a tool used for automated testing and the tool created to resolve the Ajax/Timeouts problems. As we know that brilliant tools do not need documentation and Selenide is one of them. The whole work with Selenide consists of three things:
Selenide is as simple as: $(selector).do()
Selenide IDE shows all possible variants once we pressed the dot after writing $(“selector”)
In Selenide, every method should wait for few seconds. So there is no need to use the sleeps and waits commands under the code. For example we write a below mentioned code line.
$(“#menu”).shouldHave(text(“Hello”));
In this code Selenide checks that element contains “Hello”. If not, then element should updated dynamically and wait for a little bit until it happens. For most web applications, the default timeout is 4 seconds.
Selenide makes stability of tests by resolving Ajax and Timeout issues. It provides below mentioned API’s:
In selenium Web Driver, we write
By username = By.name(“username”);
driver.findElement(username).click();
In case of Selenide, we can simply write
By username = By.byName(“username”);
$(username).click();
Selenide has inbuilt mechanism for WebDriverWait, so waiting for Ajax call is easy. We can expect stable testing for an app with Ajax calls.
Selenium Web Driver tool is not a testing tool, is a browser driving tool. So that’s why several tools are created over Selenium tool like FluentLenium, Fluent-selenium, HTMLElements, Thucydides, Yandex, Watir-webdriver. Selenide is one of them and it is created for writing concise, expressive, clean code and stable UI tests in Java.
Testers treat the system as a black box, so developers help them by writing automated tests by themselves. And the main benefit of automated tests is that developers create a simple architecture and clear design when they are forced to write tests first.
To know more comparison, read the blog: selenium vs selenide
