What is the difference between Selenium's Remote Control vs WebDriver?

Question

I'm not sure I quite understand the difference. WebDriver API also directly controls the browser of choice. When should you use selenium remote control (selenium RC) instead ?

Right now, my current situation is I am testing a web application by writing a suite with Selenium WebDriver API and letting it run on my computer. The tests are taking longer and longer to complete, so I have been searching for ways to run the tests on a Linux server.

If I use Selenium Remote Control, does this mean I have to rewrite everything I wrote with WebDriver API?

I am getting confused with Selenium Grid, Hudson, Selenium RC. I found a Selenium Grid plugin for Hudson, but not sure if this includes Selenium RC.

Am I taking the correct route? I envision the following architecture:

• Hudson running on few Ubuntu dedicated servers.
• Hudson running with Xvnc & Selenium Grid plugin. (Do I need to install Firefox separately ?)
• Selenium grid running selenium RC test suites.

I think this is far more time efficient than running test on my current working desktop computer with WebDriver API.

Answer 1

WebDriver is now Selenium 2. The Selenium and WebDriver code bases are being merged. WebDriver gets over a number of issues that Selenium has and Selenium gets over a number of issues that Webdriver has.

If you have written your tests in Selenium one you don't have to rewrite them to work with Selenium 2. We, the core developers, have written it so that you create a browser instance and inject that into Selenium and your Selenium 1 tests will work in Selenium 2. I have put an example below for you.

// You may use any WebDriver implementation. Firefox is used here as an example
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

// A "base url", used by selenium to resolve relative URLs
String baseUrl = "http://www.google.com";

// Create the Selenium implementation
Selenium selenium = new WebDriverBackedSelenium(driver, baseUrl);

// Perform actions with selenium
selenium.open("http://www.google.com");
selenium.type("name=q", "cheese");
selenium.click("name=btnG");

Selenium 2 unfortunately has not been put into Selenium 2 but it shouldn't be too long until it has been added since we are hoping to reach beta in the next couple of months.