Clarification sought on the bindings for Selenium 2 and their interaction if any with Selenium Server standalone JAR

Question

While going through the current download list for Selenium I came across this text

The Java bindings for Selenium 2, including the WebDriver API and the Selenium RC clients. Download this if you plan on just using the client-side pieces of Selenium "

Could someone please elaborate on what does the client-side pieces of Selenium refer to? The reason for my question is that I am successfully able to start a driver/browser instance on my IDE (IntelliJ IDEA) referring to only the Selenium Server (SS) standalone JAR as the reference/dependency. That lead me to wonder on the purpose of the "client-side" pieces of Selenium.

I am on a local machine "LM" with Firefox browser and I reference the SS standalone JAR as the dependency, then I am able to start a browser instance.

Suppose if I want to start a Firefox instance on a remote machine "RM" (with SS standalone JAR placed). Can I fire up my test scripts from the local machine "LM" such that it starts the SS standalone JAR on the "RM", keeping in mind that I have referred SS standalone JAR in my "LM" test scripts and not the "client side" pieces.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, the documentation on the Selenium site is not as clear as it could be.

If you compare a jar listing of selenium-server-standalone-2.16.1.jar to a jar listing of the Java client library (selenium-java-2.16.1.jar), you will see that the former is a superset of the latter. In other words, the client side pieces are included in the Selenium Server Standalone jar.

If your test runs on the same machine as your browser, all you need is the client-side piece: in your case, selenium-java-xxx.jar.

If you want to run a distributed test, where your test code runs on LM and the browser runs on RM, you need to run the Selenium Standalone Server jar on RM. I do not remember whether you need the Selenium Standalone Server jar on LM, but it will be easy enough for you to find out. Your test code for a distributed test will probably be same as for a local test except for a little bit of initialization code. See http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/Grid2 for more details.