Understanding Selenium IDE vs Selenium RC

Question

What is the difference between Selenium IDE and Selenium RC with its functionality?

Answer 1

Selenium IDE is a firefox plugin that gives you a basic recorder for recording tests. These tests are recorded in an HTML table based architecture using keywords, and IDE gives you the ability to then export the code out to other languages (Java, .Net, PHP, Python, Ruby, or Perl).

Selenium RC is an API accessible from multiple languages. Rather than recording tests, you write programs that call into the API to control the browser.

You didn't ask, but Selenium WebDriver is Selenium 2.0's equivalent of RC. It's an API that is called from whatever language you're using (I believe it supports Java, .Net, Ruby, Python, and PHP_. This is a different API than that used in Selenium RC, but there are compatibilities built in to make the transition easier.

Most people find that having a full programming language available like you do with RC/Webdriver gives them much more power and flexibility. For example, conditional statements like if thens or loops are much easier to do in a programming language than in the HTML tables that IDE works with. Selenium 2 has just been released today.

I haven't used IDE in a while, but from what I remember, most of the actual API that Selenium provides is available in both the HTML keywords and the API functions, but the API is far easier to work with and make tests beyond the simpler ones that are recordable.

There's more information available at http://seleniumhq.org

Answer 2

Selenium IDE is a firefox add-on. You are able to record/Edit/ play your test scripts. But unfortunately it supports only Firefox.

Selenium RC or the latest Web dirver it proivdes you an API to write your own test script. Also scripts can be written to test cross browser testing, to assert multiple languages (Junit, Nunit, TestNG, etc.,) and finally scripts can be taken to a Continuous Integration Environment

To maintain Selenium IDE scripts are very difficult. But Selenium RC / Webdirver test scripts maintainability or re usability is very easy

Answer 3

1 - The Selenium-IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is the tool you use to develop your Selenium test cases. It’s an easy-to-use Firefox plug-in and is generally the most efficient way to develop test cases. It also contains a context menu that allows you to first select a UI element from the browser’s currently displayed page and then select from a list of Selenium commands with parameters pre-defined according to the context of the selected UI element. This is not only a time-saver, but also an excellent way of learning Selenium script syntax.

2- Selenium RC was the main Selenium project for a long time, before the WebDriver/Selenium merge brought up Selenium 2, the newest and more powerful tool.

Selenium 1 is still actively supported (mostly in maintenance mode) and provides some features that may not be available in Selenium 2 for a while, including support for several languages (Java, Javascript, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl and C#) and support for almost every browser out there.

Reference : http://seleniumhq.org/docs/index.html

Answer 4

The Selenium-IDE is the tool you use to develop your Selenium test cases. It’s an easy-to-use Firefox plug-in and is generally the most efficient way to develop test cases.

Selenium RC is a Selenium server installed that will execute test scripts from that location. Selenium RC has the ability to use any of the supported server-side languages to write the test scripts which opens up a whole new set of error handling, scheduling, error notifying, and unit testing frameworks to use in conjunction with the Selenium core. It also supports the ability to execute the test scripts in varying browsers, where as the IDE currently only executes for Firefox.

Answer 5

Selenium IDE works on only in Firefox where as selenium RC Support multiple browser. selenium RC using null session value.