Plans for Selenium in 2009
Because BrowserMob relies on Selenium to record and play back traffic, we wanted to take a moment to share the latest news in the Selenium world with our BrowserMob customers. On the Selenium blog I just posted the following, which discusses our short-term goals for 2009:
Our two week survey is ending today and the vast majority of you have told us you like the new website. Thank you for the positive support!
I want to take a moment to let you know that we’re not standing still in the Selenium community. We know there are still many problems with the website and with Selenium in general. For example, we are aware of the broken links and poor documentation for all the Selenium projects. We also know that we haven’t put out a release in almost a year and that many of you are resorting to hacks or nightly builds to get things working for you (ie: Firefox 3 support).
Please know we’re working hard to solve all of these. Currently there is a team of volunteers (most of them previously users and not developers) working on the documentation. In parallel the developers are working to get the build for Selenium working on all the supported browsers and operating systems. We’re almost there. When the docs are done and all our tests are working, we will be releasing a 1.0 version for all the major projects (ie: IDE and RC).
If you’re interested in helping with coding, documentation, or general community management (we need moderators!) please let us know in the Selenium Developers forum. Thanks and happy new year!
Patrick & the entire Selenium development team
While it is true that the Selenium documentation is a bit disorganized right now, BrowserMob customers should rest assured that support that is bundled with any BrowserMob purchase covers not only load testing topics, but also any Selenium topic. This means that while the community documentation is evolving, you can rest assured that you still have direct access to Selenium experts.
Selenium 2.0: Just around the corner
Beyond these short term goals of finishing the documentation and getting a 1.0 release out the door, the Selenium team has even bigger goals for 2009. While it has taken several years to get to a 1.0 release (typical in open source), we hope to have a 2.0 release also happen this year.
Selenium 2.0 will focus on the integration of WebDriver, which has already begun. WebDriver is another great open source browser automation technology that is focussing on native browser driver technologies. Selenium, on the other hand, provides a general cross-browser, JavaScript-backed driver that powers many browsers. By merging the two projects together, we hope Selenium 2.0 will be a “best of both worlds”.
What this means for users is that they should see increased stability on the most popular browsers due to new native code hooks. They should also see options to test previously unavailable parts of the browser, such as uploading/downloading files, clicking on security dialog boxes, etc.
There is a lot more we hope to do, but we’re trying to first stay focussed and get 1.0 out the door.
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