Selenium IDE – Looking back and looking forward

Its been around six months and three releases since I took the reins of Selenium-IDE.
By Adam Goucher (@adamgoucher) |
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Its been around six months and three releases since I took the reins of Selenium-IDE. The fundamental change in that time has been the adoption of a plugin model like the fine folks over that Firebug. (We’re also self-hosting it which is big from a project internals perspective.)

Right now, you can add custom user-extensions and formatters, but in the very near future you will be able to add location strategies as well.

So what does the future look like for Se-IDE?

  • 1.0.8 – A whack of bug fixes, and maybe the location strategies via plugins
  • 1.0.9 – If location strategies doesn’t get into 1.0.8, it will be here. And likely bug fixes.
  • 1.0.10 – Remove UI-Element from Se-IDE and make it a plugin

There is also work on reworking the internals of Se-IDE from a synchronous model to an asynchronous through Google Summer of Code. If that is successful and we decide to use it, that will trigger a bump to 1.1.0.

Timelines you ask? Well, when I took over Se-IDE the plan was to do it monthly. That was either naive or overly optimistic so they are starting to stretch a bit. 1.0.8 is going to stretch it some more too. Look for a beta of 1.0.8 towards the end of the month with a final version by mid-August.

I know you are likely wondering what cool, superdidooper features will you be seeing in Se-IDE over the next while? Ummm, well, actually none. At least not from the core Se-IDE. There will be significant pushback on any new ‘feature’ or change that adds something to Se-IDE. If you cannot accomplish your goal through a plugin, then I would consider than an omission in terms of the API.

Thats where we are from the maintainer perspective, but end-users also have sway over this as well to some degree. We’re now using the Google Code Issue Tracker for managing the project. If you bug is not there, there is a significantly smaller chance of it being addressed. And if an issue has a number of stars on it, that is also an indicator we should be looking at it.

Now to hack on locators…