What is Katalon Studio? A Distro of Selenium, Groovy and Eclipse

So the first question is, what is Katalon Studio? Katalon Studio can best be thought of as a distro of Selenium, Groovy and Eclipse. It installs and configures the Selenium subsystem, the Groovy language subsystem and uses a customized version of Eclipse as the IDE. After setup, it’s a ready to run environment where you have a place to write scripts, select web objects and manage your project with the Project Explorer. It also sets up drivers to use Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Internet Explorer. One of the main features of Katalon is it’s object oriented approach to automation and referencing page objects. Instead of using XPATH notation in every line such as //div[@id=’wrap’]/div/div[3]/div/div/a, you create an object with that path information, then reference the object name in code. So the above would become, “Company Name” and the code would become findTestObject(‘Company Name’). Right off the bat this is easier to read and understand. And if the path to Company […]

From the Selenium IDE to Katalon Studio

At the start of 2017, we began to toy with the idea of implementing automated test to handle repetitive tasks. Could we get code to make dozens of contacts for a web site? Could we implement code to fill in forms or walk through the pages of a form? Could we verify the pages are loading? Since we were new to the game, we took the safe route and started with the Selenium IDE.   We could get started by recording actions then get fancy by editing the code and even writing our own solutions. It was also a good way to get familiar with selecting objects and deciding what sorts of actions we really wanted to automate. It actually worked quite well and when combined with the SelBlocks plugin, we had quite a bit of power to get things done. It wasn’t really automation, but steps were repeatable, so it was easy to fill in forms, create users, and […]