What is Protractor ?

Introduction to Protractor?

Protractor

• Before going to learn protractor we will discuss the automation frameworks that came before protractor.

• We have implemented automation frameworks like TestNG, cucumber, keyword driver, data-driven, etc.,. using selenium.

• While implementing those frameworks we used locators like css,tagName,className,id,name, etc.,.

• Normally, web applications (like javascript) built using HTML attributes like className, id, name, value, etc.,.by using these attributes we had implemented the earlier frameworks (TestNG, cucumber, etc.,.) using selenium locators.

• But Angular web-based applications have some extra HTML attributes like ng-init,ng-model,ng-app,ng-controlling,ng-repeat,ng-show,ng-bind, etc.,.and which is not possible for the selenium locators to identify this kind of attributes.

• In order to overcome this problem Protractor framework had introduced.
• Protractor which is built on the top of the selenium can handle this kind of attributes.

Protractor:

• protractor is an end to end testing framework for Angular JS based applications.
• While most of the frameworks focus on conducting unit tests for Angular JS applications whereas Protractor focuses on testing the actual functionality of an application.
• Protractor can also automate AngularJS and non-angularJS applications.
• Protractor built on top of WebDriverJs and all features which are in selenium webdriver is supported by it and in addition to angular specific features

Architecture of Protractor:

Architecture of Protractor

• Protractor can be implemented by using any in below 3 frameworks:

1. Jasmine
2. Cucumber
3. Mocha

• By default, protractor uses Jasmine framework.
• Protractor is a Node.js program and you will download protractor package using npm which comes with Node.js.
• NodeJs:

1. It is open-source server environment, which has all node-modules which will be used for a protractor.

• Protractor is built on webDriverJs and webDriverJs built on webDriver.

• WebDriverJs:

1.  It is a javascript implementation of selenium and it uses selenium Json-Wire protocol to interact with the browser. 
2. Protractor depends on WebDriverJs to interact with browser

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