In what used to be a client-server application world, the web-based application has brought new implications and new challenges. Cross-browser testing plays a more crucial role in testing application performance, and an open source, cross-browser testing platform named Selenium is breaking new ground with its cloud-based testing model.
Selenium was created by Jason Huggins in 2004, and the project grew as developers needed the ability to use a cross-browser testing tool that wouldn’t cost them an arm and a leg, so this new open source tool seemed like the perfect solution.
Selenium is available in two versions: Selenium Remote Control, which enables cross-browser testing for developers of Java, Ruby, Python, C Sharp, Perl; and the Selenium IDE, a Firefox-based development tool designed for beginners. With more than 2.6 million downloads os the Selenium IDE, it’s obvious that it’s becoming a popular Firefox add-on.
The founders of Selenium recently announced funding from the Contrarian Group for Sauce Labs, which is mentioned as the company that enables the cross-browser testing that Selenium is known for possible. Sauce Labs uses cloud services to make Selenium testing easier and more effective than running it on your own server, and is offering a hosted solution called Sauce On-Demand, which enables developers to remotely test web apps across multiple browsers in their cloud.
This cloud-based version of Selenium allows users to parallelize their testing, use cloud resources on demand, which in turn takes advantage of more instances in the cloud, hence faster test results and bug reports.