Java-Road to Selenium

 In this video we will see how much java is just enough to learn Selenium. Having said that the more you know about Java the more reliable automation framework you can design and implement.

when a manual tester or a test engineer decides to acquire automation skill where does he/she has to start with. And if that automation skill is web automation using selenium. where do we start with. The answer is that they should start with learning the java concepts. Does that means that they can't learn selenium without learning Java?

The answer is yes(let me explain the Yes part. With selenium IDE)&no. Now let me explain the NO part. you will have to use at least the basic level of java to use selenium at basic level. But in order design a framework and implement web automation the more and clear you know java the best you can do automation. But that doesn't mean that you have to know entire Java. And Now this is exactly where the question comes on how much Java is enough to automate application in a refined and robust manner using selenium.

We are going to discuss the following topics which are just enough. Click on each topic below to learn.

    1. What in Core Java is just enough to work with Selenium
    2. Selenium Architecture and Why Java for Selenium
    3. Introduction to Java - Class, main(), Methods, JVM, Compilation. 
           3.1. History of Java and it's components
           3.2. Anatomy of First program in Java- Class, main(), Compilation Explained
    4. Operators, Control and Loop Statements

    5. Arrays & Variable arguments

    6. Data types and Access Modifiers

    7. Objects, Constructors and some Inbuilt classes(scanner, Date&Time, string buffer..etc)

    8. Collections
    9. OOPS - Inheritance, Polymorphism, Abstraction and Encapsulation
    10. Wrapper classes, Boxing and Unboxing
    11. Keywords-Break, continue, static, final....etc
    12. Exception Handling
    13. Object Serialization
    14. Regular Expressions
    15. File Handling
    16. Miscellaneous

1.What in Core Java is just enough to work with Selenium:

    The above mentioned topics are just enough to work with Selenium. How ever the more you know java concepts the best you can make it for Selenium. I made a series of videos and the explanation as well in these posts. Please click on the above links and go through the videos for more elaborated explanations with examples.

2.Selenium Architecture and Why Java for Selenium:

            

    

Please go through the below video for detailed explanation. As they say sometimes pictures express more than words and I say videos express more than pictures.

3.Introduction to Java - Class, main(), Methods, JVM, Compilation:

    3.1. History of Java and it's components:

        

            First let us discuss why do we need Java when we had C,C++. We know that C is the mother of all languages but why we needed C++. 

            Well, yes there are many things that could be achieved with C alone and it is still the most preferred language for many developments. However there are certain disadvantages found and hence C++ is developed. One of the main thing is that C is Procedure Oriented Programming(POP) language which means the programmer has full control of the program. Data hiding wasn't possible in C and memory consumption is high. To overcome these it was needed certain improvements. At that time Simula67 was the first Object Oriented Programming(OOP) Language. Data encapsulation and lesser memory utilization was possible with this model. Now combining the best of C and Simula67 a new language called C++(C with classes) was developed and C++ became the OOPs language and has power of C. To know more on differences between C and C++ click here.....

            Now when we have C++ why we needed Java. Java was developed to fulfill certain business requirement. At that time they found out that C++ is platform/machine dependent and they have to compile the program every time on different machines where they need their software to work. Hence they wanted to eliminate the factor called platform/machine dependency. That raised them to develop a new language that is platform independent and that is JAVA. Thus you can write the code once and run it anywhere and everywhere. While developing Java they developed many more features and the concepts of Java keeps evolving since then.  To know more on differences between C++ and Java click here.....

          

There are 3 main components in Java. They are JVM, JRE and JDK. The above diagram followed by a video below explains this in a very detailed and practical manner. You physically see what JRE and JDK consists of in this video.

                                

    3.2. Anatomy of First program in Java- Class, main(), Compilation Explained:

                A detailed Explanation of Java program how it is compiled, how Java is platform independent and what runs behind when a Java program runs is explained practically in the following video.