Migrating selenium web tests to web driver from remote control

[Brent Atkinson <br...@gmail.com>]

While trying to work on some issues and experiment, I noticed that the web
tests no longer work on recent versions of firefox (as you noted in the
readme Brett). It seems like there are some incompatibilities between
firefox 18+ and recent versions of selenium.

I was able to run the suite successfully by downgrading to firefox 17.
However, it appears from the changelog that recent versions of selenium
should be supported:

https://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/SeIDEReleaseNotes#2.3.0

Since remote control is deprecated, I am wondering if it might make sense
to try and migrate the web tests to web driver.

One thing I noted is that supporting tests for multiple browsers appears to
be a bit more difficult with web driver vs remote control (since it used
injected JavaScript). At present, how many browsers are we typically
running the tests for?

Thoughts?

Brent

Re: Migrating selenium web tests to web driver from remote control

[Brent Atkinson <br...@gmail.com>]

Thanks Brett,

I tried a number of versions myself and found similar results. I didn't
realize that the RC and WebDriver APIs were going through the same code. My
understanding after reading through the documentation was that RC and
WebDriver were completely different implementations: RC using Selenium Core
and the WebDriver implementations using native browser integration. I
thought that was the reason you didn't need selenium server with WebDriver
unless you use the RemoteDriver to proxy. Given that they are just
alternative APIs, I don't understand why people would choose to use the
alternative back-ends.

http://docs.seleniumhq.org/docs/03_webdriver.jsp#alternative-back-ends-mixing-webdriver-and-rc-technologies

I agree that if this isn't likely to solve anything, the effort involved in
transitioning doesn't make much sense.

Brent


On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 9:28 PM, Brett Porter <br...@apache.org> wrote:

> Hi Brent,
>
> I just tried the latest version (Selenium 2.41.0, with Firefox 29.0.1),
> and the "Invalid Element" error has gone away, though it now appears to be
> getting stuck waiting for an element in the delete build result test. I'll
> take another look, but I'll commit it in case you have a chance to look too.
>
> The RC code is still using webdriver under the covers, so I don't think
> changing the API is going to help with that specific issue (but I could be
> wrong!).
>
> Changing the API used and giving them a decent clean up would certainly be
> beneficial, though I think you'd find the other things you're discussing
> more beneficial. Personally, I've used other tools that front-end Selenium
> as well as things like PhantomJS to write web tests recently.
>
> - Brett
>
> On 18 May 2014, at 2:37 am, Brent Atkinson <br...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > While trying to work on some issues and experiment, I noticed that the
> web
> > tests no longer work on recent versions of firefox (as you noted in the
> > readme Brett). It seems like there are some incompatibilities between
> > firefox 18+ and recent versions of selenium.
> >
> > I was able to run the suite successfully by downgrading to firefox 17.
> > However, it appears from the changelog that recent versions of selenium
> > should be supported:
> >
> > https://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/SeIDEReleaseNotes#2.3.0
> >
> > Since remote control is deprecated, I am wondering if it might make sense
> > to try and migrate the web tests to web driver.
> >
> > One thing I noted is that supporting tests for multiple browsers appears
> to
> > be a bit more difficult with web driver vs remote control (since it used
> > injected JavaScript). At present, how many browsers are we typically
> > running the tests for?
> >
> > Thoughts?
> >
> > Brent
>
>

Re: Migrating selenium web tests to web driver from remote control

[Brett Porter <br...@apache.org>]

Hi Brent,

I just tried the latest version (Selenium 2.41.0, with Firefox 29.0.1), and the "Invalid Element" error has gone away, though it now appears to be getting stuck waiting for an element in the delete build result test. I'll take another look, but I'll commit it in case you have a chance to look too.

The RC code is still using webdriver under the covers, so I don't think changing the API is going to help with that specific issue (but I could be wrong!).

Changing the API used and giving them a decent clean up would certainly be beneficial, though I think you'd find the other things you're discussing more beneficial. Personally, I've used other tools that front-end Selenium as well as things like PhantomJS to write web tests recently.

- Brett

On 18 May 2014, at 2:37 am, Brent Atkinson <br...@gmail.com> wrote:

> While trying to work on some issues and experiment, I noticed that the web
> tests no longer work on recent versions of firefox (as you noted in the
> readme Brett). It seems like there are some incompatibilities between
> firefox 18+ and recent versions of selenium.
> 
> I was able to run the suite successfully by downgrading to firefox 17.
> However, it appears from the changelog that recent versions of selenium
> should be supported:
> 
> https://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/SeIDEReleaseNotes#2.3.0
> 
> Since remote control is deprecated, I am wondering if it might make sense
> to try and migrate the web tests to web driver.
> 
> One thing I noted is that supporting tests for multiple browsers appears to
> be a bit more difficult with web driver vs remote control (since it used
> injected JavaScript). At present, how many browsers are we typically
> running the tests for?
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Brent