Selenium1(Selenium RC) overview

Selenium 1 (Selenium RC)

Introduction

As you can read in brief history of selenium project, Selenium RC was the main Selenium project for a long time, before the WebDriver/Selenium merge brought up Selenium 2, the newest and more powerful tool.

Selenium 1 is still actively supported (mostly in maintenance mode) and provides some features that may not be available in Selenium 2 for a while, including support for several languages (Java, Javascript, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl and C#) and support for almost every browser out there.

How Selenium RC Works

First, we will describe how the components of Selenium RC operate and the role each plays in running your test scripts.

RC Components

Selenium RC components are:

• The Selenium Server which launches and kills browsers, interprets and runs the Selenese commands passed from the test program, and acts as an HTTP proxy, intercepting and verifying HTTP messages passed between the browser and the AUT.
• Client libraries which provide the interface between each programming language and the Selenium RC Server.

Here is a simplified architecture diagram....

The diagram shows the client libraries communicate with the Server passing each Selenium command for execution. Then the server passes the Selenium command to the browser using Selenium-Core JavaScript commands. The browser, using its JavaScript interpreter, executes the Selenium command. This runs the Selenese action or verification you specified in your test script.