Selenium Blog

Following up on the Selenium Grid 1.0.6 release, which was mostly a bug fix release, we’re pleased to announce the release of Selenium Grid 1.0.7. This is another bug fix release that focuses primarily on how Selenium Grid handles browser sessions.

You can download it now or view the changelog. The list of changes are:

• Hub now instructs remote controls to shutdown a session if the hub is going to remove it due to being idle for too long
• Added ability to specify timeout period when waiting for remote controls to become available. Now the client can timeout gracefully and decide what it would like to do next
• Handle common case of session ID not being found, either because it timed out or was already closed; rather than raising a NullPointerException we now raise a NoSuchSessionException
• Truncate long command response bodies to 128 characters
• Retry remote control checks up to three times before deciding that a remote control is unreliable or unresponsive. This prevents aggressive unregistration of hosts that are busy or suffer from network issues

As always, patches and bug reports are appreciated:

• Code repository
• Issue tracker

Barring any critical issues, the next release of Selenium Grid will be 1.1 and will feature an enhanced Web view as well as a status API. After that, we will be moving from GitHub to Google Code to live alongside the other Selenium projects.

If you have any questions about Selenium Grid, please use either the user or the developer list, as is most appropriate for the nature of your question. Ongoing discussion about grid development should take place on the developer list.

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As you likely know by now, after years of stewardship Philippe has stepped down as maintainer of Selenium Grid and has named me the new maintainer. In this post, I hope to address the most immediate questions about what this means for the future of Selenium Grid.

Background

I realize many of you may not know who I am. I’ve been using Selenium in some capacity for close to five years now. I love working on open source software and do so primarily through my membership in the Apache Software Foundation and through my GitHub account. I hang out on the #selenium channel with the handle “nirvdrum” and have a personal page that includes some articles I’ve written and other things I’m involved with. Perhaps more importantly, I also rely on Selenium Grid for my latest start-up so I’m very keen on seeing the project mature and evolve.

Project Resources

The new canonical project repository on GitHub is the nirvdrum fork. However, within in the next month or so the project will be migrated from git and GitHub to subversion and the Selenium project on Google Code. As much as I personally prefer GitHub to Google Code, it makes the most sense from a community perspective for all Selenium projects to be hosted in the same location. The move will be made after Selenium Grid stabilizes a bit more. The 1.0.6 release was the first step in that process, but there may be one or two more minor patch releases. After the move, I’ll try to maintain a synchronized mirror of the code on GitHub so those that prefer to develop patches with git can continue to do so.

The canonical issue tracker is the Selenium issue tracker on Google Code. We will not be using either JIRA or GitHub Issues. I’ll try to migrate what I can over to the new tracker, but if I miss anything, please re-open the issue over there.

Project Evolution

Selenium Grid currently only works with Selenium 1.x, and consequently the 1.x compatibility interface in Selenium 2. There is currently no support for WebDriver. However, I fully intend to steer the product in that direction, while maintaining support for existing Selenium Grid installations (i.e., based on Selenium 1.x).

Since the project is moving to Google Code, all of the existing Selenium committers will have the ability to commit to the codebase. This should make the project’s evolution a much more collaborative effort. I’ll kickstart the process and likely lead the development effort, but the role of maintainer will be diminished (in a positive way) by allowing the entire core team equal access to the project.

Others are welcome to chime as well. Selenium Grid development discussion will be taking place on the Selenium developers list. Please continue to use the Selenium users list for usage and support inquiries.

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Selenium 2.0a3 has been released and can be downloaded from the Selenium project site. This is a major update to 2.0 and all users are encouraged to update. The new features include:

• An improved remote protocol.
• Updating the version of HtmlUnit used to 2.7.
• Improved support for simulating user interactions with the browser via native events on Linux.
• Better support for Firefox 3.6.
• Bug fixes

The .Net, Python and Ruby bindings will be updated soon, as will the maven artefacts.

The next release will be Selenium 2.0a4, and it is planned to include the following when it is released in late May:

• Android support
• A new API to support writing tests involving complex user interactions.
• Far more integration of the underlying architecture.

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