Software Testing Tools Blog – Testertools

Sauce Labs, the web application testing company, today introduced Selenium 2 support as part of its flagship cloud application testing service. Selenium 2 is the result of collaboration in the Selenium community to integrate the WebDriver project with the Selenium project. With over 4 million downloads in just 4 years, the Selenium project is one of the world’s most popular software testing frameworks for web applications.

“The focus of Selenium 2 has been our users. When your Selenium tests pass, you can be confident that your applications will work for your users,” said Simon Stewart, original creator of WebDriver and Senior Software Engineer in Test at Google. “I’m extremely pleased to see Sauce Labs carry this attention to the user from the open source project to their Sauce OnDemand service. Also, it’s extremely cool to have a video of each and every test that is run!”

Advances in Selenium 2 allow Selenium to work more tightly with browsers, offering high fidelity emulation of interactions such as clicking and typing so companies can ensure the performance of their web applications across the diverse base of browsers in use today. Key advances include:

• Support for iPhone and Android testing – Selenium 2 includes built-in Android and iPhone emulators to allow developers and QA teams to expand their use of Selenium to support the growing demand for mobile applications. Mobile application testing will be available on Sauce OnDemand in Q1 2011, but users of the service can take advantage of all other new features in Selenium 2 today.
• New API - The Selenium 2 API is more developer friendly and is also conceptually simpler because it directs users to focus on only two basic objects: WebDriver (browsers) and WebElements (anything on a web page) to construct tests. Selenium provides API libraries for most modern programming languages. In Selenium 2, every API library has been tailored to each programming language for easier usability.
• Improved architecture – Selenium 2 now features more advanced automation bindings for each browser to provide the best, most stable way to test applications. The low-level approach that Selenium 2 uses to control browsers is a more solid base for the project to add features for currently supported browsers, and provides a better framework for supporting more browsers in the future.
• Enhanced scalability – The new Selenium 2 architecture allows developers and QA teams to “scale up and down.” When a developer or QA wants to test locally on a single machine, Selenium 2 is more streamlined and “scales down” — no longer requiring the use of a background server process to control the browser from their test scripts. Therefore, simple test scenarios only call for a simplified test infrastructure. However, when teams want to run tests across multiple machines with multiple browser configurations, Selenium still retains the power necessary to handle upward scaling needs.

“Selenium sparked a revolution when it was released in 2004. We didn’t have the options for testing Ajax applications that we have today, and it was all too common to have a QA team test by hand. Selenium 2 has fomented another revolution in testing web applications, making it feasible to test this kind of application without the overhead and workarounds that the first evolution of Selenium necessitated,” said Julian Simpson, Principal Consultant at The Build Doctor. “Sauce Labs is another kind of revolution, making it easy for anybody to enjoy Selenium 2’s ease of testing with freedom from the tyranny of deploying an array of browsers and operating systems. Using Sauce OnDemand is worth it to avoid Internet Explorer 6 alone.”

“At Sauce Labs, we’re proud to provide a Selenium 2 offering that delivers one of the most robust testing experiences for web and mobile applications available today,” said Jason Huggins, original creator of the Selenium project and co-founder of Sauce Labs. “Selenium 2 is a significant advancement for application testing because it moves beyond some of the previous challenges in Selenium 1’s architecture and provides a stable base for enhancing the entire tool chain. We’re confident Selenium 2 will prove to be very compelling for developers and QA teams alike.”

Sauce Labs, the Selenium company, today rolled out Sauce TV to customers of its Sauce OnDemand cross-browser testing service. Designed to eliminate a critical ‘blind spot’ when testing applications in the cloud, Sauce TV gives developers a live, secure view of their tests running on Sauce Labs’ cloud machines.

Developers can shorten their test debugging cycles with the confidence of knowing what’s going on at all times – and share testing videos with their teams.

With almost two million tests already served in the cloud, Sauce OnDemand is the premier cloud-based Selenium service. Created to meet customer demand, Sauce TV delivers full visibility into cross-browser testing cycles in a secure environment. Users have access to only their own tests and do not have to wait until the end to discover issues, allowing for faster debugging cycles. Sauce TV’s remote desktop player also works directly in the web browser without any extra software needed.

With Sauce TV, Sauce Labs continues to simplify and improve the cross browser-testing infrastructure for companies. Sauce TV features and benefits include:

* Live view of tests running in the cloud
* Remote desktop player works right in the web browser
* Faster test debugging cycle
* Ease-of-use with no complicated software to install

For more information on Sauce OnDemand, or to run a test today with a 30-day risk-free trial, visit http://saucelabs.com/ondemand.