Is there an interpreter for sending commands to Selenium?

Question

I'm a Perl programmer doing some web application testing using Selenium. I was wondering if there's some kind of interactive interpreter which would allow me to type Selenium commands at a prompt and have them sent to selenium.

The way I'm currently developing code is to type all of the commands into a Perl script, and then execute the script. This make the development process painfully slow, because it makes it necessary to rerun the entire script whenever I make a change.

(If I were a Ruby programmer, I bet the Interactive Ruby Shell could help with this, but I'm hoping to find a solution for Perl.) Thanks!

Answer 1

The Java-based SeleniumServer has an --interactive mode.

Answer 2

I don't know about a Selenium shell, but if you are looking for a Perl REPL, there are modules such as Devel::REPL and Carp::REPL. I've made shells for various simple things using my Polyglot module, although I haven't looked at that in awhile.

Answer 3

May I ask why it's "necessary to re-run the entire script"? Since your solution is an interactive shell, i'm assuming that it's NOT because you need previous commands to set something up. If that's a correct assumption, simply make your set of Selenium commands in Perl script in such a way that you can skip the first N commands.

You can do it by explicit "if" wrappers.

Or you can have a generic "call a Selenium command based on a config hash" driver executed in a loop, and adding the config hash for every single Selenum command to an array of hashes.

Then you can either have an input parameter to the test script that refers to a # in an array; or you can even include unique labels for each test as a part of a config hash and pass "start with test named X" or even "only do test named X" as input on command line.