Selenium WebDriver – Data-Driven Automation Framework

Selenium Webdriver is a tool for testing web applications. One of its major advantages over Selenium RC is that the Webdriver can operate in any browser without injecting JavaScript. Hence, it's much faster, and because of that reason, tests are more reliable as they are executed quickly and check many scenarios per minute. Instead of injecting javascript into browsers as Selenium RC does, it directly calls the native functionality of each browser to automate it. As a result, Webdriver is quicker than Selenium RC.

One of the most popular tools for automating web applications is Selenium Webdriver. It allows the programmer to write functional tests that work on each browser and platform combination that you need to test.

Apart from all these, Selenium WebDriver can also easily handle scenarios like alerts, pop-ups, and ajax requests. It comes with inbuilt functionality to handle keyboard and mouse actions.

Webdriver allows us to operate the web browser through a unified and standardized programming interface. Since Webdriver directly calls different browsers' methods, we have a separate driver for each browser. This makes writing test scripts easy and running them across all browsers and platforms.

Building Architectures with Selenium WebDriver

An in-depth comprehension of Web-UI automation using Selenium WebDriver requires knowledge of the architecture of Selenium WebDriver. To comprehend the architecture, we must first understand the four elements that make up this framework.

Library for Selenium clients

Selenium WebDriver's creators have made it feasible to handle a variety of programming languages. We can develop Selenium automation scripts in the language of our choice, such as Java, Python, C#, Ruby, Javascript, etc., thanks to the Selenium Client Library or language bindings component of the Selenium WebDriver architecture.

Website drivers

We have a unique browser driver for every supported browser in Selenium. These drivers pass commands to the appropriate browsers after receiving them from the Selenium scripts.

These browser drivers enable communication between the Selenium script and the various browsers in this fashion. Additionally, the communication takes place without revealing the browsers' internal workings.

FirefoxDriver, ChromeDriver, InternetExplorerDriver, SafariDriver, OperaBrowser, EdgeDriver, and HtmlUnitDriver are a few of the Selenium browser drivers.

HTTP over JSON Wire Protocol

JSON or JavaScript Object Notation is a simple data format for storing and sending data. The JSON wire protocol enables data transport between the client and server via the internet.

The JSON wire protocol is utilized in the WebDriver architecture to facilitate communication between the Selenium scripts and the Browser Drivers.

Browsers 

After receiving the command, the browsers call the appropriate method to perform the required automation operation. Among the numerous browsers Selenium supports are chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Edge, Safari, Opera, and more.

LambdaTest automation testing cloud makes it easy to run Selenium scripts on more than 3000+ real browsers, devices and OS combinations in the cloud. You can also use parallel execution tool to cut down by more than 10x on your testing time

Conclusion

The main purpose of Selenium WebDriver is to run cross-browser tests. This tool is used to automate web-based applications' testing to ensure they function as expected. You can choose a programming language to use while creating test scripts with Selenium WebDriver, which makes it easy to learn and use.