Capturing browsers with Selenium RC

Question

I want to run UI tests using browserfarms like BrowserStack. We are currently using BS to run Unit tests via JsTestDriver. So starting the server, letting a bunch of browsers created by the browserfarm connect to the jstd server and then execute the tests.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a way to write UI tests that work with jstd (click some button, type something, etc).

Selenium RC is a framework that aims to UI tests, however it forces to use own browser instances: Selenium starts its own browsers via Drivers that are part of the framework.

What I want is to combine the JsTestDriver concept with the UI testing of Selenium: write tests with Selenium, start the Selenium RC server on a localhost, let a bunch of browser connect to the server that were started on a browserfarm and then execute the UI tests.

Is this even possible? Is there another way to run UI tests with JSTD? Is Selenium RC not capable of capturing browsers that are not started using a webdriver?

thanks in advance.

Mordant

Answer 1

Technically yes, but it's gonna hurt.
Since jsTestDriver supports asynchronous tests, you can start (and connect to it) a browser (using JavaScript) in the setup stage.

"Is Selenium RC not capable of capturing browsers that are not started using a webdriver?" Probably not in the near future.

Shipway

Note that you want to use jsTestDriver, which is a tool for unit tests, to perform integration tests. What are the advantages you wish to get from jsTestDriver? Why not write selenium tests using JS? – Shipway

Thanks for pointing me to that issue. As said, we are already using JsTestDriver for normal, non-UI unit tests together with a browserfarm. We wish to test our UI using a browserfarm, too, but that doesn't work with Selenium apparently. – Mordant