selenium WebDriver简介

selenium

selenium [sɪ’liːnɪəm],中文直译 n. [化学] 硒
官网http://www.seleniumhq.org/
中文社区:http://www.selenium.org.cn/
selenium 主页的介绍摘录一下

Selenium automates browsers. That’s it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) be automated as well.
Selenium has the support of some of the largest browser vendors who have taken (or are taking) steps to make Selenium a native part of their browser. It is also the core technology in countless other browser automation tools, APIs and frameworks.

菜鸡一只,尝试翻译一下.
Selenium可以使浏览器变成自动化工具,对的,就是这么神奇,你用Selenium做什么完全取决于你自己.首先,它是一个WEB自动化测试工具,但是,它的功能不仅限于此.一些讨厌的基于web的任务,重复性的任务也可以(bi xu)是自动进行的.
Selenium已经支持了一些大型的浏览器,这些浏览器都已经(或者正在)把Selenium变成他们原生支持的一部分①.它也是其他无数的自动化测试工具的核心技术.
①应该是这些浏览器厂商提供了Selenium的driver

Selenium WebDriver

Selenium 下面有四个项目,

Selenium WebDriver
Selenium Grid
Selenium IDE
Selenium Remote Control

对于WebDriver官网是这样说的:

Selenium WebDriver can drive a browser natively either locally or on remote machines.
我的简单理解是这样的,WebDriver可以驱动真实的原生浏览器(本地或者远程),驱动原生浏览器的优点是,只要在WebDriver下可以通过的测试,在浏览器的环境下必然也可以通过,
WebDriver支持多语言:java/csharp/python/ruby/phpperl/javascript
支持多浏览器