Canoo WebFunctionalTest / Selenium, features comparison

Question

For features comparison of Web Canoo Web Functional Test and Selenium software, it would be good have an assessment, in terms of integration to Java platform applications, speed, how quick is it to deploy Tests, execute, and analyze results, JavaScript support etc. I am using Canoo project, it is pretty good.

Tatyana

Answer 1

I have not used Canoo, but I have used Selenium for several years.

Selenium's approach is different from Canoo in that Selenium does not attempt to emulate a browser, it automates/scripts existing browsers. That way you don't have to worry about JavaScript compatibility or details of the rendering engine in a particular browser.

Selenium Remote Control is a process that starts up a browser, gets Selenium commands over a network socket, and executes those commands in the browser.

I agree with Daniel's answer above, the Selenium IDE is a killer feature! Once you have the add-on in Firefox, you can quickly build unit test suites, right click on webpages and choose assertions, and much more.

Selenium Remote Control integration with other languages is straightforward, you send commands to the remote control process from your language of choice.

I've used Selenium RC from Haskell, Python, Java and C# so far, it works fine.

I think you would be able to run tests for MSIE from a Linux build server by opening up the Selenium RC socket permissions. Be aware that's a potential security problem though.

Answer 2

So I initially pursued Canoo as a direction for functional tests. I ended up choosing Selenium as we saw that running selenium in browser was a better fit for us than Canoo which uses HTTPUnit to run tests.

If you are running tests at build time with selenium you will need to have the browser software you wish to use on the build server. It is not possible for us to test IE on our build server for example....So we only run the tests in Firefox.

The killer feature for us was the Selenium IDE. We have folks using the selenium IDE who are not really developers which is a great help. The development team works with them to make sure the tests are running properly.

Canoo has its own advantages that, A rather biased blog entry is here: http://mguillem.wordpress.com/2007/10/29/webtest-vs-selenium-webtest-wins-13-5/

Note that in spite of all those things I still prefer Selenium...