WebDriver: now at Sauce Labs
Posted on by Julian SimpsonWebDriver now runs against Sauce Labs‘ testing service – using many different browsers. And you can pay by the hour. This is awesome:
- Selenium was a huge leap forward in web testing.
- Sauce Labs has been allowing people to run Selenium tests against any browser and operating systems.
- Selenium2 (WebDriver) is another great leap forward.
- Now their Sauce OnDemand product works with WebDriver.
- Someone else deals with Internet Explorer 6.
If you’re used to running IT in a small company, you might wonder that the fuss is; surely you roll out some desktop or VM machines, and get on with your testing? I was recently talking to someone who had worked at a large North American bank: they had a Service Level Agreement to provide virtual machines six weeks after they were requested. I shit you not.
I’ve been testing the service with Cucumber and WebDriver, and it’s been really useful. My tests took on a new level of usefulness when everything had to connect to a real hostname, and not localhost. It’s helped flushed out network related bugs in my code.
They’re quite pleased about it:
Obviously we’re big believers in Selenium. As you might imagine, given that we offer Selenium as a cloud service, we’ve had a fair amount of exposure to the issues that motivated the creation of Selenium 2. So we sought to offer Selenium 2 in our service at the earliest responsible date that would support production usage. Three months ago we quietly introduced Selenium 2 in our production service. We instantly had literally 100s of customers using its Selenium 1 compatibility mode. Since then we’ve steadily ratcheted up the number of Selenium 2 users in private beta and today are excited to throw the doors open to the public to use Selenium 2 in the cloud for the first time.
(John Dunham, co-founder and CEO)
