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It's a Bird, it's a Plane...it's Selenium
By Brian Ewoldt | June 29, 2015
When you hear the word "Selenium" what comes to mind? Is it the metal that Wolverine's blades and bones are made of? Nope, that's adamantium. Is it the material that Iron Man's suit is made of? Nope, that would be gold titanium alloy. Selenium is a real element on the periodic table that has the symbol SE, an atomic number of 34, and semi conductive properties. Selenium used to be used in photocells and other electronics, but has since been replaced by silicon. Today you will find Selenium used in glass-making and pigments, plus there are very small traces in some dietary supplements. Now, with the miracle of modern technology, Selenium has been turned into an open source web site testing/automation tool.
It provides developers with scriptable record and playback features allowing them to write automation tests in a number of popular programming languages including C#, Java, JavaScript, Haskell, Objective-C, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. The Selenium suite of tools can be run in a Windows, Apple OS X, or Linux operating system and supports most major web browsers. Now that you know the power of Selenium you must remember...with great power comes great responsibility! Become a Selenium superhero with these two new courses featuring expert Brigitte Birze: Selenium Fundamentals: IDE (Now available)
This IDE is a tool that can be used by itself or in conjunction with the other Selenium tools to quickly prototype test scripts or locate web elements. In this course you will learn about the Selenium tool suite and get in-depth look at the Selenium IDE. Selenium Fundamentals: WebDriver (Coming July 6th) WebDriver is the main tool in the Selenium tools suite, with the ability to natively drive a web application in the same way a human user would. This course will teach you the basics of creating WebDriver applications.
You will learn how to build with the WebDriver libraries, how to configure WebDriver to talk natively to the different browsers, and how to use the main WebDriver classes to exercise your web applications. Selenium can't make Superman weak...that would be Kryptonite. And Selenium really won't give you super-human powers like Batman. However, you can be a superhero for your company when you use Selenium to save time and money when testing your next web application.