A couple of weeks ago, I 'stumbled' upon a blog post by the Ajaxian guys in which they mentioned Selenium's ability to test AJAX applications.

As a not so active as I should be maintainer of the jWebUnit project, it sparked my curiosity immediately. JavaScript support in jWebUnit (and HTTPUnit, on which jWebUnit is based) is mediocre at best and not well supported. Running inside the browser makes cross-browser testing much easier: all you need is the browser version you want your application to run in, and point it to the selenium testsuite for your application.

When I took 2 hours to play with Selenium, I was blown away. Together with the Selenium recorder (now Selenium IDE) you have testing dynamite in your hands. Usually deploying a website takes a lot of regression testing which doesn't happen too often. Using Selenium you can run a good sanity test within 5 minutes.

I find it hard to say, but in my opinion the days of jWebUnit as a functional/integration test suite are numbered. Perhaps one release to fix the outstanding bugs, upgrade the libraries, and then move over to the new world: Selenium.