Advantage of Arquillian Drone compared to Selenium IDE

[jee-developer]

Hello,

i am using Arquillian Drone for my functional tests of websites and i like it. But there is also the possibility to test your webpages via Selenium IDE on your webbrowser.

In the presentation of Arquillian (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfoJAshalx4) the speaker mentions that Selenium IDE is a bad option, because there will be problems with the XPATH, but he didn't explained it in detail. I wanted to know what exactly is the disadvantage of Selenium IDE and the advantage of Drone in this example. Because the XPATH problems are also present in the Drone Framework, if you inject Webelements of your webpage with the annotation.

I hope someone can explain it in detail what the problem with Selenium IDE is and what Drone do to prevent it.

Many thanks in advance

[jhuska]

Hello,

speaking about XPath locators: they should be avoided if possible, because they are not reliable (you can read about it more e.g. here), they slower to locate according to our experience. IMHO they are also less readable and it is more difficult to maintain them. In this matter there is no difference between Selenium IDE and Drone. They should be imho avoided if possible in both frameworks (not sure if possible in Selenium IDE).

A crucial advantages of Drone over Selenium IDE: Firstly, there are the same advantages which WebDriver (Selenium 2) has over Selenium IDE, because Drone is using it internally. It can be read for example in this post.

Drone, however, adds another advantages: instantiation of WebDriver object automatically, possibility to config the browser from one point (arquillian.xml), injection of resources to the test, and overall integration with whole Arquillian lifecycle (starting container, deploying, ...).

Last project mentioned in the video is Graphene, and that is the last piece in the Arquillian Universe of Web UI testing. That project is currently recommended to use for functional testing your web site. For more information please see its getting started guide, or its documentation

Should you have more questions please ask.