Appium is an open source test automation tool for mobile applications. Which is capable to test any kind of mobile application: native, hybrid and mobile web for iOs and android platform. It can also run the automated tests on devices as well as emulators.

We all have our mobile applications in at least these two major platforms and we need such a beautiful automation tool like appium. It allows testing cross platform. It seems easy as such same code base is sufficient enough for both different frameworks.

The basic philosophy of Appium is that you should be able to reuse code between iOS and Android, and that’s why when you see the API they are same across iOS and android. Another important thing to highlight here is that unlike Calabash, Appium doesn’t modify your app or need you to even recompile the app.

You may choose any of your preferred language as it’s an open source project there are wrappers available in every major language.

Appium Architecture

Let’s try to understand what happens behind the scenes.

Appium server which actullay you download is written in Node.js and that implements the Selenium WebDriver. It allows one to use available WebDriver client to fire your tests and then your mobile app acts precisely like a web app where the DOM is represented by View hierarchy.

So this server basically exposes REST api which performs the following actions:

 Receives connection from client
 Listen command
 Execute command
 Respond back the command execution status

In terms of architecture diagram, below is how Appium can be explained.

We’re going to dive into appium a bit more, and we’ll be bind it to ruby in text series.

And if you get stuck… Ask Here

^{email me rajeevsharma86@gmail.com}