What is Selenium? What are the different Selenium components?

Question

What is Selenium? What are the different Selenium components?

Answer

Selenium is one of the most popular automated testing suites.Selenium is not just a single tool or a utility, rather a package of several testing tools and for the same reason, it is referred to as a Suite.

It consists of following set of tools

Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE) - Selenium IDE is a record and playback tool. It is distributed as a Firefox Plugin.

Selenium Remote Control (RC) - Selenium RC is a server that allows a user to create test scripts in the desired programming language. It also allows executing test scripts within the large spectrum of browsers.

Selenium WebDriver - WebDriver is a different tool altogether that has various advantages over Selenium RC. WebDriver directly communicates with the web browser and uses its native compatibility to automate.

Selenium Grid - Selenium Grid is used to distribute your test execution on multiple platforms and environments concurrently.