Originally a ThoughtWorks project (hence the old docs are really awful). Really active community. Lots of folks in the IRC channel willing to help. Most core devs are in Europe, so get on IRC early. Constantly, if not consistently, dropping new releases. Project is quite large, but well divided along functional and language lines.
Selenium server (hub and nodes) are java applications. They communicate using a JSON based wire protocol that's very well documented on the selenium project page. Some browsers require native clients in addition to the selenium grid. (Chrome, Android). There are defaults for setting up the grid but plenty of options for specifying the binary location of browsers, how many to run, etc. Can run multiple versions of the same browser on the same node with the same Selenium client.
The WebDriver will talk to the grid hub to determine which node(s) to offer up. I *believe* the WebDriver then simply talks directly to the nodes without going through the hub.
Our existing QTP tests were mostly record-and-playback style tests. We wanted more data-driven tests to alleviate the need to manually QA parts of the application. We were going to have to re-write the QTP tests anyway even if we stuck with it.
Show the project structure, highlight the fact that each part is distinct.
Show the Eclipse test configs to highlight switching between grid mode and standalone mode.
Once these builds are done: - Application is installed from the latest green build from our build automation server - Dataset is dropped, recreated, and migrated to latest version. - Selenium test code has itself been built and tested.
Use the Jenkins Xvnc plugin to get headless tests running.