Selenium WebDriver (http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/GettingStarted ) is a tool for automating testing web applications, and in particular to verify that they work as expected. It aims to provide a friendly API that's easy to explore and understand, which will help make your tests easier to read and maintain. It's not tied to any particular test framework, so it can be used equally well with JUnit, TestNG or from a plain old "main" method. WebDriver sits at the heart of the forthcoming Selenium 2 (http://seleniumhq.org/ ) release, as well as being the foundation for Watir 2 (http://watir.com/ ) as well.
Rather than being a pure Javascript framework, WebDriver works by integrating as tightly as possible with the browser and makes use of the facilities of the OS. This allows it to accurately emulate user input, as well as cleanly handling areas that other frameworks find troublesome, including file uploads and alerts. How closely does WebDriver integrate with the browser? Opera and Chrome offer their own implementations of the WebDriver interfaces, shipping as part of the browser, and Mozilla are starting to adopt the technology for their test tools.
Simon Stewart works as an Software Engineer in Test at Google and is the innovator behind WebDriver. He has previously worked at ThoughtWorks and is an active member contributor to Open Source.
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