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What is the difference between Selenium IDE and Selenium RC with its functionality?
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Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a Firefox plugin. It is the simplest framework in the Selenium Suite. It allows us to record and playback the scripts. Even though we can create scripts using Selenium IDE, we need to use Selenium RC or Selenium WebDriver to write more advanced and robust test cases.
The big news here is that Selenium RC is now officially dead. While everyone using Selenium RC has had years of advance notice to start using WebDriver instead, there are surely a few stragglers out there who will be significantly affected if they want to continue upgrading their version of Selenium.
WebDriver has a simple architecture - the browser is controlled from the OS level and you just need the language IDE. 2. Selenium RC is much slower as it uses a JavaScript program called Selenium Core. WebDriver is much faster as the engine of the browser is used to control it.
It overcomes the limitations of Selenium IDE. It acts as a center in between commands and browser. The process of operation fulfillment is very faster performed compared to Selenium IDE. We can run tests in different browsers like Mozilla, Opera, Chrome, IE, and Safari with the use of the server.
Selenium IDE is a firefox plugin that gives you a basic recorder for recording tests. These tests are recorded in an HTML table based architecture using keywords, and IDE gives you the ability to then export the code out to other languages (Java, .Net, PHP, Python, Ruby, or Perl).
Selenium RC is an API accessible from multiple languages. Rather than recording tests, you write programs that call into the API to control the browser.
You didn't ask, but Selenium WebDriver is Selenium 2.0's equivalent of RC. It's an API that is called from whatever language you're using (I believe it supports Java, .Net, Ruby, Python, and PHP_. This is a different API than that used in Selenium RC, but there are compatibilities built in to make the transition easier.
Most people find that having a full programming language available like you do with RC/Webdriver gives them much more power and flexibility. For example, conditional statements like if thens or loops are much easier to do in a programming language than in the HTML tables that IDE works with. Selenium 2 has just been released today.
I haven't used IDE in a while, but from what I remember, most of the actual API that Selenium provides is available in both the HTML keywords and the API functions, but the API is far easier to work with and make tests beyond the simpler ones that are recordable.
There's more information available at http://seleniumhq.org
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Selenium IDE is a firefox add-on. You are able to record/Edit/ play your test scripts. But unfortunately it supports only Firefox.
Selenium RC or the latest Web dirver it proivdes you an API to write your own test script. Also scripts can be written to test cross browser testing, to assert multiple languages (Junit, Nunit, TestNG, etc.,) and finally scripts can be taken to a Continuous Integration Environment
To maintain Selenium IDE scripts are very difficult. But Selenium RC / Webdirver test scripts maintainability or re usability is very easy
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