A Glance on Appium

                                        

Appium an open source testing framework that is based on selenium web driver that is extended with new classes to support mobile applications and hybrid testing    

 Appium extends  Remote Webdriver to support mobile application automation, providing:

• Identification of the application to automate
• Launching application either directly from capabilities or with launchApp() method
• Functionality to support mobile applications such as swipe,tap,Zoom,Rotate
• Support for OS automation selectors:

                              UIAutomation for iOS

                              UIAutomator for Android API level 16 or higher

Google's Instrumentation for Android API level 15 or less(Selendroid)

It uses JSON wire protocol internally to interact with iOS and Selenium Webdriver for android native applications.Appium uses client-server architecture,this means a client written in any language can be used to send the http requests to the server.So you can manage your test environment as you like.Appium supports the below  mentioned client libraries:Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript, and C#.

Identifying Objects: Identifying objects on different type of mobile applications can be done in different ways.

Web applications :DOM objects

Native applications : Appium automation framework

Hybrid application :Appium automation framework

         In the world of mobile application identifying objects is not that simple.Apple has its own set of proprietary set of UI elements and android has its own.

Appium references the UI elements using the name provided by the proprietary description file and this is appium framework objectory.

Appium framework uses two different objectory representation this means we need to create two different tests one for iOS and another for Android.Each object is defined by set of attributes that defines what is actually displayed.For ex:Text attribute defines text that is displayed.

 

Appium Drivers:Appium supports Android and iOS differently.The way Appium work is the different automation drivers for the platforms,which means we need to write different tests for platform.

Currently appium supports two flavors of automation driver.

AndroidDriver class-supports android applications.

iOSDriver class-for applications in iOS environment