stimulus-use VS Selenium WebDriver

You can see that I added a dependency here: stimulus-use.

“stimulus-use: Add composable behaviors to your Stimulus controllers, like debouncing, detecting outside clicks and many other things.

Actually, Stimulus is pretty cool because you can compose multiple pre-built behaviors into one Stimulus controller, for a sort of functional approach to component behaviors. The tradeoff is that a growing web of Stimulus controllers (plus HTML data attributes associated with them) can become complex and hard to understand.

The stimulus-use project is a collection of reusable behaviors for Stimulus. If you are familiar with React, this project is similar to React’s hooks system, but for Stimulus controllers.

To make using the IntersectionObserver API easier, we will add the wonderful stimulus-use package to our application. This is not a requirement, but it does simplify the code a bit.

Finally, as we recently added the Stimulus-Use library to our project, we made sure to upgrade it to current beta which supports Stimulus 3.

As you’ll see below, I am importing useClickOutside from stimulus-use, it’s a great library with small, composable helpers, I urge you to check it out!

For example, we have a few ”live search“ fields, backed by back-end Fetch requests, on some pages. The live search function was usually triggered by the keyup event and Cuprite was such a fast typewriter that it frequently sent multiple requests almost at once. If some of the responses got a bit late or out of sync, the front-end JavaScript code began hitting issues. We solved this by adopting a technique called debouncing and, frankly, we should have done this since the beginning. By the way, we used the useDebounce module from the marvelous Stimulus-use library to achieve this.

Selenium is an extensively used open-source automation framework for web applications. It allows for cross-browser testing by automating browser actions, making it a staple tool for end-to-end testing in diverse web development environments.

While similar to Puppeteer, Cypress, and Selenium, there are some differences. Let’s find out what they are.

browser.get('http://selenium.dev/')

Cypress is a next-generation front-end Automation testing tool built for modern web applications. It is a JavaScript-based end-to-end testing framework and is known for faster test execution as compared with other testing tools (like Selenium or Protractor).

Removing ExpectedConditions from documentation makes sense since it was removed from the codebase around 2019 already.

https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium --> trunk

You won't be able to test the javascript function itself from within python, but you can exercise the front-end code using something like cypress (https://cypress.io) or the older but still respectable selenium (https://selenium.dev).

once you solve this you may run into: https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/issues/11750, so add that workaround.

Other libraries with similar functionality are Selenium, which is very popular outside the JavaScript world, and Playwright, a younger step-brother of Puppeteer.

🔗 https://selenium.dev