When we hear the word Selenium we might think that what Selenium is. For a person who is not familiar with the concept of software testing won’t know what Selenium is. Basically Selenium is Element in the periodic table. But here Selenium is a software tool used for the web testing. Selenium was originally developed by Jason Huggins in 2004 as an internal tool at Thought Works. Huggins was later joined by other programmers and testers at Thought Works. Before Paul Hammant joined the team and steered the development of the second mode of operation that would later become 'Selenium Remote Control' (RC). The tool was open sourced that year.
The name Selenium comes from a joke made by Huggins in an email, mocking a competitor named Mercury, saying that you can cure mercury poisoning by taking selenium supplements. The others that received the email took the name and ran with it. For web testing we are using Selenium WebDriver. WebDriver is the second version of the Selenium.
Selenium RC + WebDriver = Selenium 2.0
Selenium RC is the first Selenium Remote Control (RC) is a server, written in Java, that accepts commands for the browser via HTTP. RC makes it possible to write automated tests for a web application in any programming language, which allows for better integration of Selenium in existing unit test frameworks. To make writing tests easier, Selenium project currently provides client drivers for PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET, Perl and Java. The Java driver can also be used with JavaScript (via the Rhino engine). A new instance of selenium RC server is needed to launch html test case - which means that the port should be different for each parallel run. However, for Java/PHP test case only one Selenium RC instance needs to be running continuously
