Selenium's WebDriver tools can be used together with Scala, ScalaTest and sbt to create a great functional testing toolkit. This will give you the ability to test in various browsers, use a fast "headless" browser and even test iPhone and Android apps and web sites; though I haven't gotten to mobile testing yet.

WebDriver is a set of java libraries providing drivers which pass instructions to the browser allowing you to script control of a web page and verify results. These drivers start up your web browser on your computer and runs the tests; which you can watch as it goes. There are drivers for Firefox, IE, Safari, Chrome and as mentioned above iPhone and Android emulators. One of the great features of controlling a real browser is you can test real user interactions such as AJAX or other complex Javascript.

Additionally there is an HtmlUnitDriver which does not control a browser, but uses the HtmlUnit library to simulate a browser, allowing these tests to run much faster since you are not waiting for a browser to start and passing data back and forth.

The benefits I see using the WebDriver framework over regular Selenium tests is (1) faster tests running and (2) the ability to use a full set of programming paradigms around the tests. I find it easier to create scenarios and reusable tests by being able to create classes, extensions and normal programming logic. This is another benefit to using Scala with the power and extensibility of Scala Traits.

So let's jump in to some examples and see what capabilities the tools have.

Quick Start

1. Install Scala: http://www.scala-lang.org/
2. Install SBT: http://code.google.com/p/simple-build-tool/
3. Check out my scaft test framework from github: git://github.com/mkaz/scaft.git
4. Run tests

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How to Run Tests with SBT

Start sbt $ sbt

Run all tests > test

Run a single test > test-only GoogleSearch

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Developing Tests

Here's an example of a basic test, which will fetch the Google homepage and verify the title is correct.

import org.scalatest.FlatSpec
import org.openqa.selenium._
import org.openqa.selenium.htmlunit._
class GoogleSearch extends FlatSpec {
  val driver = new HtmlUnitDriver
  driver.get("http://www.google.com")
  // verify we retrieved the page and have the title
  "Google" should "have the proper title" in {
    assert(driver.getTitle() === "Google")
  }
}

To verify specific elements exist on the page, you can select them in various ways, by html tag, class, id, form name and even using by using XPath queries. You'll want to bookmark the Web Driver API for reference.

Here's an example using Google again, which will find the query input field by name, type in a query, submit and verify we received ten results and the term is in the the results set.

class GoogleSearch extends FlatSpec {
  val driver = new HtmlUnitDriver
  driver.get("http://www.google.com")
  // verify we retrieved the page and have the title
  "Google" should "have the proper title" in {
    assert(driver.getTitle() === "Google")
  }

  it should "be able to perform a query" in {
    // do a search and confirm results
    // get form element
    val inputElement = driver.findElement(By.name("q"))
    
    // type in search query
    inputElement.sendKeys("vizsla puppies")
    
    // submit form - can be done from any form element
    // you dont need to locate the submit button
    inputElement.submit
  }

  // after a page submit, the driver object will be
  // on the next page, so now we can test results
  it should "have ten results" in {
    // find result set block
    val resultSet = driver.findElementById("rso")
    
    // count # of results
    val lis = resultSet.findElements(By.tagName("li"))
    assert(lis.size >= 10)
  }

  it should "have term in result set" in {
    val firstResult = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[@id='rso']/li[1]/h3"))
    assert(firstResult.getText contains "vizsla puppies")
  }
}

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Using Firefox Driver for Ajax

Here's an ajax interactive example using Google Maps. The test will go to Google Maps, perform a search and verify the results, which are returned via ajax.

/**
* Test of Google Maps - Firefox Driver
* verify map search and ajax result
*/
class GoogleMaps extends FlatSpec {
  val driver = new FirefoxDriver
  driver.get("http://maps.google.com")
  // verify we retrieve the page and have the title
  "Google Maps" should "have the proper title" in {
    assert(driver.getTitle() === "Google Maps")
  }

  it should "be able to perform a query" in {
    // get form element
    val inputElement = driver.findElement(By.name("q"))

    // type in search query
    inputElement.sendKeys("San Francisco")

    // submit form
    inputElement.submit
  }

  // find span with place title
  it should "have the proper location title" in {
    val titleElement = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//span[@class='pp-place-title']/span"))
    assert(titleElement.getText == "San Francisco, CA")
  }
}

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Additional Resources

• ScalaTest - The tests are written using ScalaTest, which supports several different ways to create tests.
• Watir, a similar functional test tool using Ruby
• Geb, another similar functinoal test tool using Groovy