How many days it will take to learn Selenium with Python?

Is Selenium with Python easy to learn?

I am looking for a good open source web crawling framework in python.

What was suggested are Selenium with Python. But I want to know does it require basic programming skills of Python?

There is a difference between a framework that takes care of most low-level stuff, and automates tests for you, and a framework that allows you to build automated tests by only using language constructs and libraries available in your platform/system. Selenium lets you automate testing using the web browser that you are trying to test - basically, every webpage will start up a browser and do something interesting. For testing a web service, this might be submitting a form with some data. For testing an intranet application, this would mean a POST request containing some parameters and maybe cookies. In both cases, we try to simulate exactly how a user would do that, using the browser (and potentially other means - eg reading access logs).

In most cases where we need to test a web service or an intranet application, Selenium doesn't need to know anything about the code. The tests only interact with a browser, and nothing else. There are some exceptions - see @tvan's comment above on how to do web service testing with a proxy server - but that isn't what Selenium is meant to do in most cases.

Python isn't used directly, but selenium does make extensive use of standard Python libs for tasks like cookies manipulation, browser operations (XHR requests etc.), parsing web pages and handling javascripts etc. If you are new to programming, then Selenium can be a bit overwhelming, but when you understand the basics of programming in general, then Selenium is very straightforward, easy to use and learn.

How many days it will take to learn Selenium with Python?

This article will talk about how to start learning selenium with Python and also I am not going to talk about it separately but just as a part of complete script which I already created in my post-graduate course.

You will see, it is possible to learn selenium very quick if you follow the steps mentioned in this article.

If you read earlier articles of mine you will get the idea and concept very quickly that in Selenium there are two scripts and they are: Page Object Modules- These scripts are made using a page object design pattern to make automation easy. WebDriver - Using these scripts, we can automate multiple functionalities on a web page. If we have an application with a login form then the steps would be: Open the Home Page - As user navigates the application, open the home page automatically without user knowing. Login to the application - Enter your login details and click on login button. View the Welcome Page - Now login is done, now you need to navigate to the welcome page and click on Register button. There is one more thing: If I am writing the complete script without using any modules for example, I will use the function 'waitfor' from selenium-webdriver module. You can check the complete test script here. The important thing to notice about this script is that the login functionality is a page object. So, all user interactions will be handled by page object only. Moreover, at the beginning we need to click on the Login Button, then after logging in we need to navigate to the Welcome page.

If we want to learn selenium with python, I would not call it as an easy script and also its length is also not a good thing in terms of automation. Because this script contains many things and many if-else statements so it might be confusing for a beginner. That's why I don't give up the whole script or write it fully.

If you read my previous article for beginners called- Test Automation with Selenium And Python by Using Jmeter then you may have got the idea that we need to start the application first and then we navigate to different pages and enter the details. When the login is done, then we navigate to a welcome page.

Can I use Selenium with Python?

I would like to start learning selenium for my testing tools but I don't know if it is possible to start with Python and move to Java after?

I've been doing python for a while but that's all I know. No you can't, Selenium has an API which is Java only. The only way you will be able to test it is using a tool such as Eclipse. But then you have to learn Java and Eclipse anyway, so might as well just do the same thing and use Java.

Is Selenium with Python in demand?

The number of applications in the Google Trends Search is a useful tool to find trends and patterns among web-related content on the internet. It can show us, for example, the number of searches that are done in a certain language and at a certain time. And it can also show us what programming languages people might be using in the future.

The application lets us select our preferred programming languages and shows how many search hits they have. We can check the list of trending programming languages on Google Trends (see figure 2). For example, JavaScript is in second place (behind C#), Java is fifth and Python is last. But why does this happen?

Figure 2: Google Trends for programming languages. In the beginning, when Google started their experiment with programming languages, the interest for these languages was minimal. For example, the number of searches for Java rose gradually over the years. When Selenium gained more attention in the market and the number of applications increased, it became apparent that Python was not able to keep up with Selenium. In the following years, the interest for Selenium decreased sharply.

Nowadays, the Python programming language and other programming languages related to Selenium have not kept up with the increase in the interest in Selenium. When we analyze the search data by Google Trends, we see that Python in some countries, for example, Australia and Austria, has a large interest in a similar magnitude as the interest for the programming languages Java and C#.

And Java? Java has lost interest to some degree compared to the other programming languages. In countries such as Germany and Japan, there is currently less interest for Java than for Python and JavaScript.

This is why the data for Google Trends is useful for us. If you search for programming languages, for example, python programming language, the search data will allow you to quickly see the state of programming languages that are in demand in a particular country or region. And this is the key to the future success of Selenium.

Why does Selenium get so little attention in programming languages in some countries? Google Trends gives us the answers. The data shows that the interest for Selenium as a programming language in some countries is minimal.