The Open Source World of Selenium - 1

Its been a while I have written a technical blog. Writing technical books take a lot of time and space, leaves me with a less feel to write blog technical in nature too. But this I want to do. So here is the first one in this series. The article in here is going to introduce what the series is going to be about, and also to help keep me and the reader in focus of what to write and expect from here. If it falls short of your expectations, I apologize. But if it helps you in some way, let me know, i would feel good about it.

Ok another thing i want to share here is, as I write this blog I have lately came to admire the various GenAI models available for image creation, which I will use. And sometimes if for text rewording. Although I haven't yet started enjoying them, sometimes i find them just being dumb, and then I realize they are following instructions, maybe my instructions are dumb.. ok lame attempt, back to article.

Selenium - for the nth time - AUTOMATES BROWSER. Ok. Now we have that clear, let us understand the open source world of Selenium. This article series will be exploring different other open source solutions which are built in and around Selenium to help use Selenium better. Use Selenium for what, for automation for testing web and similar applications for which Selenium could be used for. Selenium isn't restricted to testing, again saying it one more time.

Selenium can be implemented using different programming languages it supports. The client bindings of Selenium WebDriver which are currently available and supported by the project are Java, CSharp, Ruby, Python and Kotlin(https://www.selenium.dev/downloads/) . Many open source solutions have been made available around these client bindings to provide a boiler plate framework to help implement Selenium for the test automation needs. This series of articles aims to explore that. Here not only I would explore the names, I wish to explore what is the health of that open source projects, support, creators and other information I can avail which already exists and / or I might use my journalistic investigative tendencies(i have none btw) to find. Having said that, if you happen to have more information, feel free to add in form of comments on the article.

So now I have set the expectations of the series, let us get going with this one. So we have understood Selenium project support 6 programming languages. This means that for these languages Selenium API library will be available. Let us note the links to access them.

1. Java - https://www.selenium.dev/selenium/docs/api/java/index.html
2. CSharp- https://www.selenium.dev/selenium/docs/api/dotnet/
3. Ruby- https://www.selenium.dev/selenium/docs/api/rb/
4. Python- https://www.selenium.dev/selenium/docs/api/py/
5. Javascript -https://www.selenium.dev/selenium/docs/api/javascript/index.html
6. Kotlin - uses java bindings - https://www.selenium.dev/selenium/docs/api/java/index.html

Knowing the API helps you understand the different entities of the Selenium WebDriver project. Any open source solution built over Selenium, to help implementation of Selenium will be using the classes mentioned in these API's for any language. Basically they will be building over it. Which also means, that when you implement Selenium for your test automation project, you can either decide to use Selenium directly and build your own, try to be generic so that others can benefit, or use any of the available ones out there provided you are sure of how they work, and if you get stuck for some reason how can you find help.

So now coming to statistics and health of an open source project. Let us first start with Selenium. I will take a few pointers which I will mention data on for any project. The pointers are - number of years in existence, website link, support channels, github details, any thing else I find worthy of mention I will. So for Selenium it is -

Selenium - Website - https://www.selenium.dev/

Years in existence - 19 years ( as of article being written, going to be 20 this year)

Github Link- https://github.com/SeleniumHQ

main project selenium github - https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium

Explore details starting this page -https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/pulse

Open PRs - https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/pulls

Support for Selenium - https://www.selenium.dev/support/

Conferences around Selenium - https://www.selenium.dev/events/ (this page is not up to date, i am aware because i get involved in some of them and entire information isn't available yet)

please note that information shared is as of today, the world of open source keeps changing. This is why instead of sharing numbers, I am sharing the link, so that you can explore and decide for yourself, instead of relying on others to make that decision for you, i know its easy but well we also know easy doesn't necessarily means right, well sometimes it seems right for example if you are feeling hungry grabbing that chocolate is easy, cutting that cucumber instead and eating that, now that is tough, at least for me it is. So what do I do, I make a choice to sometimes eat the chocolate and sometimes the cucumber. Ok another lame attempt.

That is all for now folks, have a meeting a crucial one, wish me luck if you made it till here! I will know through that :)

Until article 2...

**disclaimer- views expressed are all mine, i mean if it wasn't clear, saying it better with this.