Blogging Pubbitch

The first public commit to the WebDriver repository was on 31st December, 2006. Some 280 revisions and 421 days later, it looks like its days are numbered. It's achieved far more than I thought it would; there's support for Firefox, various versions of IE and some basic support for Safari. I've written proof-of-concept bindings of the IE driver in C#, Python and Ruby, and I'm told that people have bindings for the Firefox driver that sink support for it into the Ruby on Rails testing grammar. Better yet, people are presenting about it at conferences and the community behind it is starting to grow.

Why, if it's all going so well, are its days numbered? The answer is that "WebDriver" won't be around for too much longer because it's going to become part of the Selenium 2.0 effort.

The original version of this post posed the questions "why do that?" and "what does it mean?", but you know what? I'm going to answer those in a different post. For now, I think the most important thing to remember is that this is going to make Selenium even better. It's going to be great!

The official announcement was at the recent Selenium User Open Evening. I have to say "thank you" to the Selenium development team for even thinking about this, and to all the people who have had a hand in making WebDriver as complete as it is. More so, I should thank the early adopters for their feedback and comments, both on the project page and the mailing list. Thank you!