Selenium is not just a single tool but a suite of software's, each having a different approach to support automation testing. It comprises of four major components which include :
Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE) : It is a Firefox/Chrome plug-in that was developed to speed up the creation of automation scripts. It records the user actions on the web browser and exports them as a reusable script.
Selenium Remote Control (RC) : RC is a server that allows users to write application tests in various programming languages. The commands from the test script are accepted by this server and are sent to the browser as Selenium core JavaScript commands. The browser then behaves accordingly.
Selenium WebDriver : WebDriver is a programming interface that helps create and run test cases. It makes provision to act on web elements. Unlike RC, WebDriver does not require an additional server and interacts natively with the browser applications.
Selenium Grid : The grid was designed to distribute commands to different machines simultaneously. It allows the parallel execution of tests on different browsers and different operating systems. It is exceptionally flexible and is integrated with other suite components for simultaneous execution.
