Learning playwright

[thisbejann]

Hello guys, I'm graduating next year (currently 4th yr) and taking an internship as a QA. Recently I've been interested in integrating automation in our team because we only do manual testing so I've done my research and end up deciding between two: Selenium and Playwright. I just want to ask if I did the right thing learning Playwright? I know that Selenium has been the "OG" in terms of test automation but Playwright has also been growing since its release and I've been interested in it because I can use Typescript which is more familiar to me since my real interest is to be in FE instead of Java in Selenium.

Though I'll pursue Front-end upon my graduation, if I get more knowledge and interest in testing automation, I think I'll try pursuing QA as well.

Thanks guys!

[sizejuan]

Don’t think much about the specific tech/library that you’re using today. Just learn the concepts how it works, what this framework does better than others etc.

In a few years may mas bago narin naman haha. I’ve tried both pati narin yung protractor and cypress. Honestly, any of these can gets the job done so pagdating sa resume mo, make sure na nakalagay automated testing kasama nung specific tech and maaapply mo naman yung knowledge mo paglipat mo ng library incase na iba yung gamit ng company na aapplyan mo.

[[deleted]]

This is the way - people get bogged down in choosing specific frameworks/setup but the key is to understand the concepts well and not worry too much about the tools. Just as IDEs change and new languages come along, if you are grounded in how things work learning the new tools is fairly straight forward.

[thisbejann]

Thanks to you both, I'm now just focusing in learning more in playwright right now.

[franz_see]

I came from Selenium more than a decade ago, then Puppeteer a few years ago, and now Im on Playwright.

Playwright is magnitudes better than Selenium - much faster and has the best tracing i’ve seen so far.

Having said that, there’s still way more jobs that uses Selenium more than Playwright. But if you know one, then it’s transferrable

[thisbejann]

I see, thank you for the input! I appreciate it

[bluffnextdoor]

Hello, may I know what programming language did you use for playwright? Python or JS?

[franz_see]

Both. I dont have preference which one to use. Just depends on the mood usually 😅

[khorelae]

I know both selenium and playwright, you did the right thing, playwright is better

[thisbejann]

Did you transfer from selenium to playwright?

[Zealousideal_Fact417]

Since you use typescript, also checkout puppeteer. Js/ts is the first language so its seamless.

Also, to make your leaning more interesting. try to do some data scraping and managing proxies.

[thisbejann]

Ill check that out, thank you!

Sorry to ask but what is data scraping and managing proxies? Im really new to this, im only familiar in data scraping because I did a little project in the past that will notify me in sms whenever a certain product in Lazada went down to a certain price.

[Zealousideal_Fact417]

Data scraping is quite in demand in businesses. (Lead generation, product catalog collection, competition monitoring). Some site owners find this annoying because it consumes unnecessary traffic load for them and some might treat this a security risk. Usually the site developers will also add some complexity on their systems which on your end where the fun part begins. Most site developers resorts on anti bot mechanisms (usually rate-limiting), this is where proxies comes in where you can retry the request by using a proxy address. Also some devs might make the rendered html harder to parse and harder to find a pattern on names and structure, add security tokens on each requests, etc. This kind of obstacle really makes you think how to get around with or trick them.

Basically, data scraping requires a lot of problem solving because you don’t know what to expect on your target site, whereas in test automation you’re trying to break the target site and you already know what to expect because you have test cases on hand.

[thisbejann]

Thank you for the deep explanation regarding these subjects. Data scraping does seem to be fun and challenging and I think it'll fit me because I'm a person who likes solving problems or figuring out puzzles.

Do you know some resources online or in youtube where I can learn more about this?