Bob's Blog

A few weeks ago during MXUnit Office Hours, Bill Shelton demonstrated using WebDriver to create functional tests in Java. It was a pretty cool demo and I meant to give it a whirl for a while, but only got around to doing it this weekend. I had to refer back to the recording of the session a number of times, so I thought it would be worthwhile to document the steps to get a project up and running in Eclipse that uses WebDriver. Let's start with some background.

What is WebDriver?

WebDriver is a tool that allows you to write code, in a number of languages, that automates a browser and allows you to interrogate what is rendered by the browser. You can use these features to created automated tests of a web application. You may be familiar with a tool called Selenium, which does similar things, but works within the context of a web browser itself. The Selenium project and the WebDriver project are merging to create Selenium 2.0. That project is a work in progress, but there's nothing to stop you from experimenting with WebDriver right now.

For a bit more of an official definition, here's some info from the Selenium 2.0 and WebDriver page at SeleniumHQ:

WebDriver is a tool for automating testing web applications, and in particular to verify that they work as expected. It aims to provide a friendly API that's easy to explore and understand, which will help make your tests easier to read and maintain. It's not tied to any particular test framework, so it can be used equally well with JUnit, TestNG or from a plain old "main" method.

WebDriver uses a different underlying framework from Selenium's javascript Selenium-Core. It also provides an alternative API with functionality not supported in Selenium-RC. WebDriver does not depend on a javascript core embedded within the browser, therefore it is able to avoid some long-running Selenium limitations.

WebDriver's goal is to provide an API that establishes

• A well-designed standard programming interface for web-app testing.
• Improved consistency between browsers.
• Additional functionality addressing testing problems not well-supported in Selenium 1.0.

I hope to write a number of posts about working with WebDriver. This first post will be a quick guide to setting up an Eclipse project and getting WebDriver to interact with a web page. Let's get started.

Create a Java Project

We're going to be writing Java code to drive WebDriver, so the first thing we need is a new Java project. Before starting this investigation I had written a grand total of 0 lines of Java code in Eclipse, so I didn't have a clue where to start. Luckily, as I mentioned in the opening, Bill demonstrated all of the steps for us in his presentation during MXUnit Office Hours, so I was able to just copy his steps.

1. Open Eclipse (or CFBuilder, which I'm sure you know is Eclipse).
2. From the menu choose File, New, Project...
3. In the folder Java, choose Java Project.

   

4. Give your project a name, accept the rest of the defaults, and click Next.

   

5. Accept the defaults and click Finish.

   

Add the WebDriver jar files to your project

Next we need to add the jar files that are required by WebDriver to our project. We'll start by downloading them.

1. Go to the Selenium Google Code Page
2. From the sidebar labelled Featured downloads, choose the Selenium Java zip. As of this writing the file is called selenium-java-2.0a4.zip. That will take you to the page for the download itself.
3. Click on the filename to download the zip to your machine.
4. Unzip the files into the project that you just created. Bill suggested creating a folder under the project root called /lib, and then a folder underneath that called selenium-jars and placing the files there.
5. Back in Eclipse, right click on your project in the Package Explorer and choose Build Path, Configure Build Path....
6. Choose the Libraries tab, if it isn't already selected.
7. Click Add Jars...
8. Select all of the jars that you just unzipped into the /lib/selenium-jars/ folder and click OK. Your Java Build Path dialog should look something like this:

   

9. Choose the primary selenium jar, which in this example is selenium-java-2.0a4.jar, click the down triangle and double-click on Javadoc location. Adding a Javadoc location will add help information to code assist.

   

10. Enter the location for the Selenium JavaDocs into the Javadoc location path field. The current location is http://selenium.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/docs/api/java/.

    

11. Click OK and then OK again. Your project is now ready to use the WebDriver API.

Add a class that uses WebDriver

In this next step I'm going to depart from Bill's presentation and show you how to create a standalone Java project that uses WebDriver. Bill showed us how to create a JUnit test that uses WebDriver, and that is probably what you're going to want to do to create an actual functional test, but to keep things simple let's just try to get WebDriver to do something. In the next post I'll go over creating a JUnit test.

1. Right click on the /src folder in your project and choose New, Package.
2. Give the package a name and click Finish.

   

3. Right click on the package and choose New, Class.
4. Give the class a name and accept the other defaults, but make sure that public static void main(String[] args) is checked under Which method stubs would you like to create? Click Finish.

   

You should end up in an editor window for your new class that contains code similar to this:

Edit your code so it looks like this:

Run it!

Press shift+command+F11 to run your Java project. You should see a Firefox browser start up, navigate to www.google.com, enter the text MXUnit into the search field, and submit the form, so you end up looking at the MXUnit search results. This worked on my system, and hopefully it will work on yours. I'm quite new to all of this, but I did see mentions of issues with different installations of Firefox, and, of course, you must have Firefox installed in order for this to work.

I'm not going to explain what any of the code above is doing, but it should be pretty easy to interpret. I will go into more details in a future blog post, but I think this post has now covered what I wanted to cover, which is how to get WebDriver up and running in Eclipse. As I mentioned above, the next post will be about writing a JUnit test that uses WebDriver so we can do some actual functional testing with it.

Once again I'd like to mention that all of this info was gleaned from Bill Shelton's presentation during MXUnit Office Hours, which run every other Monday from noon to 1pm Eastern time. I encourage anyone and everyone to join us at experts.na3.acrobat.com/mxunit-office-hours/.