What is a web driver?
web driver is an automation framework, that allows you to execute your test against different browsers like Selenium, Firefox as well as chrome. This allows you to create a programming language in creating scripts. Here you can use conditional operators like if- then else (or) Switch Case. It is an upgrade to RC and is much faster. Additionally, it makes direct calls with a web browser. Besides each browser has its own driver on which the application runs. Online training says Selenium Webdriver supports the following browsers.
Selenium web driver Architecture
The Selenium web driver architecture is shown below :
If you observe the architecture from the below diagram, Firefox (or) any other browsers, extends the remote driver class and the remote driver class implements the driver interface.
For instance, the Firefox driver is a class that has written (or) designed specifically for Firefox browsers. This includes all the methods that can be instantiated further. Moreover, as defined in the webdriver interface, it performs all the methods on the Firefox browser.
Remote web driver implements a web driver interface. And the automation test engineer executes their scripts through a remote web server (or) a remote machine.
And the selenium web driver implements the web driver interface. The web driver interface serves as a contract for different browsers specific implementation like Chrome Driver, Firefox driver.
Also, check what's new in the latest selenium webdriver 3.10.0?
This web driver architecture consists of 3 layers :
Language Binding :
Language binding is a languages bunch that are developing a framework and interacting with selenium webdriver and working on various browsers and other devices. So if you want to implement the JAVA driver, you need to use JAVA bindings. Likewise, if you want to use browser driver for other languages like C#, Ruby, and Python, you can use python for that language. The language binding intended to develop multiple languages.
web driver API:
An API is communication between programming languages and browsers. And this API sends commands taken from languages to interpret it and sends it to the respective web driver. In other words, this has a common library that sends commands to the respective drivers.
Browser drivers:
The browser driver helps in communication with the browser. Using remote web driver, the drivers receive commands directly from the server and perform several actions on different browsers. Each browser will have different browsers and each browser knows driving the web browser.
For instance, Firefox driver knows to handle details of the Firefox driver and perform different actions like button click, page traveling, fetching data from the browser and so on.
Benefits of Selenium webdriver:
This tool supports seven programming languages like JAVA, C#, PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl as well as.Net
This supports testing on various browsers like Firefox, Chrome as well as Safari
This supports testing on different operations like Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, IOS
This overcomes the limitations of Selenium V1 is file upload, download, pop-ups as well as dialog barrier.
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Limitations of web driver:
Cannot readily support new browsers:
This web driver operates on the OS level. Besides different browsers communicates with the operating system in different ways. And if the new browser comes, it operated with the OS in a different way. So it takes some time to configure and support with the new browsers
Do not have built-in Command to automatically generate the test file :
Like Rc, It does not have a built-in command to automatically generates the text file. And you must rely on Selenium IDE’s output window. Else you must rely on other languages like HTML.