Selenium is a package of several testing tools. It is therefore often referred to as a Selenium Suite with each of these tools designed to cater to a different testing requirement.
The following are the different components of Selenium Suite:
Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE): It is a Firefox/Chrome plug-in that is developed to speed up the creation of automation scripts by recording the user actions on the web browser and exporting them as a reusable script.
Selenium Remote Control (RC): It is a server that enables users to generate test scripts in their preferred programming language. It accepts commands from the test scripts and sends them to the browser as Selenium core JavaScript commands, for the browser to behave accordingly.
Selenium WebDriver: It is a programming interface that helps create and run test cases by directly communicating with the web browser and using its native compatibility to automate. Unlike RC, it doesn’t require an additional server to create and run test cases.
Selenium Grid: It allows parallel execution of tests on different browsers and operating systems by distributing commands to other machines simultaneously.