First, let me try to explain what Selenium is. So, if you go by the official definition, Selenium automates browsers that’s it. It is a set of tools to automate browsers on many platforms. WebDriver is among this set of tools along with IDE, RC (Remote Control) and Grid. We’ll talk only about Selenium WebDriver in this post.

What is Selenium WebDriver and what does it do?

Selenium WebDriver is a test automation framework which is used to automate the tests on different browsers. WebDriver controls the browsers by directly communicating with them. Selenium WebDriver is very powerful and this power can be best utilized by using a programming language to write the tests. Writing tests using a programming language is also known as scripting and there are many programming languages which can be used with Selenium WebDriver for the purpose of scripting. Here’s the list of the programming languages supported by Selenium WebDriver:

Java Python C# PHP Perl Ruby

Out of all these languages mentioned above, Java is widely used and adopted by most of the organizations in the industry. We’ll cover our WebDriver tutorials using Java only.