Protractor : Introduction to PROTRACTOR tool

What is Protractor:

·         Protractor is an end-to-end test framework for Angular and AngularJS applications. Protractor runs tests against your application running in a real browser

·         Protractor is built on top of WebDriverJS, which uses native events and browser-specific drivers to interact with your application as a user would.

·         Protractor supports Angular-specific locator strategies, which allows you to test Angular-specific elements without any setup effort on your part.

·         Protractor also speeds up your testing as it avoids the need for a lot of “sleeps” and “waits” in your tests, as it optimizes sleep and wait times

·         It runs on real browsers and headless browser

History:

·         The first version of Protractor was released in July, 2013, when the framework was basically a prototype of a testing framework. However, Google, with the support of the testing community, is evolving the framework to follow the evolution of AngularJS and to meet the needs of the community that is using AngularJS.

·         The Protractor project is public in Github and you can follow the issues in the project, add issues you think are interesting, comment on issues opened by others, do a pull request to help the project, etc. Anyone interested in supporting the growth of the project is welcome!

Protractor is a framework for automation of functional tests, so its intention isn't to be the only way to test an AngularJS application, but to cover the acceptance criteria required by the user

Salient Features of Protractor:

·         It is built on the top of Selenium server.

·          Introduced new simple syntaxes to write tests.

·          The developer/tester can take advantage of Selenium grid to run multiple browsers.

·          A developer can use Jasmine or Mocha to write test suites.

As Protractor was built on top of Selenium WebDriver, so it contains every feature that is available in the Selenium WebDriver. Also, Protractor provides some new strategies and functions which are very useful to automate AngularJS applications.

It is also possible to use some drivers which implement WebDriver's wire protocol like ChromeDriver and GhostDriver, as Protractor runs on top of the Selenium. In the case of ChromeDriver it is possible to run tests without the Selenium Server. However to run tests using GhostDriver you need to use PhantomJS which uses GhostDriver to run tests in Headless mode.

What is Angular JS applications:

They are Web Applications which uses extended HTML's syntax to express web application components. It is mainly used for dynamic web applications. These applications use less and flexible code compared with normal Web Applications.

Why cant we use selenium webdriver for Angular Applications:

Angular applications has attributes like ng-repeater, ng-controller, ng-model.., etc. which are not included in Selenium locators due to which selenium is not able identify such objects. So Protractor on top of Selenium can handle those objects in any web application.