Introduction

Up to now, the WebDriver class has supported running browser and mobile tests from a local IDE of choice, and IntelliJ as a standard practice. In that context, browsers can be tested for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, IE/MS-Edge (if running Windows), and Safari (if running iOS). For mobile devices, the local choices are somewhat limited: Android phones and tablets for Linux and Windows environments, iPhone and iPad for iOS environments.

Now, what if there is a need for compatibility testing on, say, 10 different browser/platform combinations, and 10 different mobile device/platform combinations? It becomes a little cumbersome to try and test those using local development environments.

This is where the Selenium Grid Architecture comes in. The Selenium WebDriver class has an extended class called RemoteWebDriver that supports running the same set of tests remotely across platforms, browsers, and mobile devices. It uses the JSON wire protocol to communicate between the Selenium server...