


How does Appium architecture meet the Appium philosophy?Īppium is an HTTP webserver, written in Node.js using a REST API. A mobile automation framework should be open source, in spirit and practice as well as in name!.A mobile automation framework shouldn't reinvent the wheel when it comes to automation APIs.You shouldn't be locked into a specific language or framework to write and run your tests.You shouldn't have to recompile your app or modify it in any way in order to automate it.It is designed according to the following philosophy: Appium PhilosophyĪppium is cross-platform. Alongside Selendroid, Appium is a framework based on Selenium that was specially created for mobile automated testing. The big drawback of Selenium, especially in today's mobile-centric world, is that Selenium itself was not designed for automating tests for mobile apps.īut fret not. You can write them in a WebDriver-compatible language such as Java and Objective-C, but you can also use JavaScript, Python, C# and many more. When you use Selenium WebDriver, you need to write your test scripts. Selenium is supported by the greatest number of browser vendors, and version 3.0 has just been released. It’s a suite of different tools, with two main functional parts:įigure 1 below shows the characteristics of these two very functional tools for web browser testing.įigure 1: The characteristics of the Selenium Suite: Selenium WebDriver and Selenium IDE ( source) You should understand, however, that Selenium is not just a single tool. DevOps Engineers get two for the price of one by using Selenium. This means Selenium is not only useful for automating tests for web applications - It also can automate online administration tasks. Selenium, the well-known web browser automation suite of tools, is an essential ingredient for testing because it automates browser testing. These tools work in different ways, with important implications for the level of automation you can introduce to your tests.īelow, I compare Appium to Selenium, and explain how you can make the most of whichever tool you decide to use.

You need to test for different things, and there is usually a wider range of devices to support when it comes to mobile.īut perhaps the biggest difference is that one of the most popular testing tools for mobile apps is Appium, whereas Selenium is more common for non-mobile testing. Mobile testing is different in all sorts of ways. Is mobile application testing any different than normal software testing? While software testers' lives might be easier if the answer to that question were "no," that is not the case, of course.
