Selecting An IDE

Once you have installed Selenium, you would need to start writing scripts. But the question arises, where are you gonna write the scripts. Primarily the choice for most of today’s programmers and scripters are the IDE’s. These IDE’s are built in with intellisense, which reduces the burden of code writing, along with error/syntax checking, at run time which allows you to write syntactically correct program.

If you have an earlier idea of programming, you can select the following IDE’s -whichever suits you

• PyCharm

 PyCharm is an IDE, dedicated to Python coding. It is developed and sold by JetBrains, one of the leading companies involved in IDE and professional tools development. Many of you can recognize this company if you used IntelliJ IDEA .

PyCharm, in today’s world is one of the most powerful and versatile IDE developed for Python. It provides support for Python, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, CSS and a host of other languages. JetBrains has implemented a whole lot of cool features like language-aware code completion, error detection, on-the-fly code fixes as well.

Also PyCharm supports various web development frameworks like Django, Flask etc. So you don’t need to worry about using another IDE.

PyCharm comes in two editions- community and professional editions. The community edition is free, while professional is the one which you have to pay for. Here is an example of PyCharm IDE running a python script.

• PyDev Eclipse Plugin

Many of the Python-developers are the ones, who are migrating from Java to Python. And most of them have used Eclipse IDE. For these people, who have prior experience with Eclipse, there is a PyDev Eclipse Plugin, which lets you program Python in Eclipse too.

Since every body knows the power, flexibility and support of the Eclipse community, it’s safe to say that Eclipse PyDev is one of the most well-liked IDE for people making a cross over.

For using PyDev, you need to install the PyDev Plugin seperately, after setting up Eclipse. You can refer to this brilliant article by Lars Vogel here , to install PyDev.

• PyScripter

PyScripter is another choice of IDE for Python. PyScripter is only available for Windows. PyScripter is an open source, lightweight, IDE, and offers all options that are offered by modern IDE’s like Intellisense, code completion, error checking, debugging etc.

The choice of choosing an IDE depends on you. As for the sake of these tutorials, we will be using PyCharm, since it is the most widely used, versatile and flexible IDE for Python.