SmartGwt 4.0 WebDriver Support

[siegersallee]

Good afternoon Isomorphic,

I have a question in regards to the Selenium Support for WebDriver. There is a situation where we are now finally starting our regression testing for our application. This path of development has been on a standstill as we are evaluating whether to use Selenium RC (your recommended approach) or WebDriver. I have been doing research on the forums as far as this topic goes. The most relevant one pertains to this thread below.

http://forums.smartclient.com/showthread.php?t=21330

The post here is a little over a year old. I have also read the javadoc listed here:

http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwte...edTesting.html

Most of the issues described in the above I feel are just minor nuisances. I just have a few key questions in regard to this matter:

1. Do you still stand behind your approach for using RC as described in the latest 4.0 JavaDoc's currently today?

2. Has there been any feature sponsorship to facilitate the use of Selenium WebDriver?

I know that from 3.1 to 4.0, the selenium folder has been greatly built upon to make the WebDriver support available. I am just wondering why so much resources on your end has been dedicated to put the functionality of WebDriver in SmartGWT since you still recommend Selenium RC. It gives the feeling that WebDriver will be the standard in the future as Selenium RC fades out of the picture.

We are currently using 3.1 and this is a critical aspect to our development right now. I am evaluating whether it really would be worth it to upgrade even though SeleniumHQ still marks it as deprecated.

[Isomorphic]

These questions are a bit odd.. yes we stand behind the recommendations in the docs, that's why we wrote it :)

You'll note that going from 3.1 to 4.0, we addressed the primary shortcomings of WebDriver (inability to do record/playback) by extending WebDriver with SmartClient/SmartGWT-specific tools.

The discussion in the docs still recommends Selenium RC overall, but having fixed the primary problems with WebDriver, it's a much less strongly worded recommendation than in 3.1.

WebDriver enables testing of just a handful of scenarios that cannot be covered by Selenium RC (like uploading a specific file), that's why we added support.

[siegersallee]

Thank you for your reply.

After further research, I came across the official Selenium blog. The article is fairly recent. (08/28/2013)

It listed a road map for Selenium as far as what their plans are going to be for the rest of the year.

http://seleniumhq.wordpress.com/2013...to-selenium-3/

It states that the original Selenium Core implementations are going to be removed once Selenium 3 is shipped (ETA: Christmas 2013). The only implementation of using RC is going to be the APIs backed by WebDriver.

This leads me to believe that by the time Selenium 3 is out, all new versions of RC will cease. As a result, when any new browser versions are released, it will most likely break any current regression testing. I just wanted to post this to see if you have seen what Selenium is going to be doing with RC, and if your approach with automated testing will change in the JavaDocs once Selenium 3 is released. I know right now it is still too early to tell but based on this information, it is suggesting the move to WebDriver since the RC APIs will only exist there.

[Isomorphic]

This is some internal shifting in an as-yet unreleased product, and it will be a looong time before people stop using Selenium 2.

What matters is to use record and playback for the majority of your tests, and keep your tests in Selenese, not Java, so that they are understandable by more people. Our current support allows you to do this with RC or WebDriver.