1. Introduction to Selenium RC (alias - Selenium 1)

Pre-requisites for Selenium RC: Selenium IDE - Please go through Selenium IDE posts at http://selenium-by-arun.blogspot.in (i.e. from Post#1 What is Selenium?  to Post#27 Finding Locators for UI elements using the Selenium  IDE's recording feature ) Java - Please go through 'Java for Selenium' posts at http://selenium-by-arun.blogspot.in (i.e. Post#28  Java for Selenium to Post# 157 Using lastIndexOf( ) method with StringBuffer Eclipse IDE - Please go through Eclipse IDE posts at http://selenium-by-arun.blogspot.in (i.e. Post#8 Install Eclipse IDE to Post#10 How to create Projects in Eclipse IDE? )

What is Selenium RC ? Selenium RC allows you to write Automation tests in any supported programming language (say Java).  Selenium RC is also knows as Selenium Remote Control and Selenium 1. Selenium RC is an open source and free tool. Selenium RC was the main Selenium Project for long time (i.e. Currently Selenium 2 is the main project). Selenium 2 still runs Selenium 1's Selenium RC interface for backwards compatibility. Selenium RC has support for almost all browsers Selenium RC has support for several programming languages like Java, C#, Ruby, Python, Pearl, Javascript and PHP) Selenium RC is the sever version of Selenium. You write  your tests using a programming language (say Java) and client library. Your tests issues commands which the client library sends to the server. The server then performs your actions for you in the browser and reports the results back to your client.

How Selenium RC works? Click this image to view Full Screen After looking into the above screenshot, its very clear that The client sends the commands to the server and the server runs the commands to drive the browser. Finally the server sends back the results observed on driving the browser to the client.

How to install Selenium RC ? will be explained in the next post.