In this lesson, we will learn how to work with Selenium 2 directly within PHPUnit. For those unfamiliar, Selenium gives us an easy way to automate the browser. This makes it perfect for writing user acceptances tests.

You can download the source for the files and tests that they use in the demo. You can find links to the other articles in their testing series here (covering things like TDD, basic PHPUnit testing and definitions of some of the most common testing terms).

So I've taken it upon myself to do a bit of reading and messing around with the Selenium Extension for PHPUnit and I wanted to share a bit of what I learned. Looking around on the internet, I didn't find a whole lot of real good information on the Selenium2TestCase API so I want to provide a little bit of depth in some of those areas. I'm going to cover a few areas of interest and provide some code examples where relevant.

He includes the steps to get things set up to connect with the Selenium server and some of the common functions you can use to interact with its browser. He shows how to select items and interact with things like forms and links. He also includes a recommendation of using the "url()" method to jump to a point in the app instead of clicking through the same paths over and over again.

Tools like ZombieJS, (PhantomJS, and more) are built in order to run tests without a browser. And so they are called headless. They don't require a browser window to start, they don't show any interactions on screen.

They briefly mention the "delay" option that's been introduced to allow for manual delays to be put into your code. You can find out more about this testing tool from its main project page or by just jumping in and reading through the docs. (You can also find the full code over on github.)