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Overview of Appium

As mentioned on the main page, Appium is an open-source project and ecosystem of related software, designed to facilitate UI automation of many app platforms. With the release of Appium 2.0, Appium has the following primary goals:1

  • Make platform-specific automation capabilities available under a cross-platform, standard API
  • Allow easy access to this API from any programming language
  • Provide tools to enable convenient community development of Appium extensions

So, take any app platform you know about, like iOS or Android. Appium wants for there to be a way for developers and testers to write UI automation code for that platform, according to a single, unified API. Based on Appium's goals, we have a lot of questions to answer to make it all work:

  • Which API should that "single, unified" API be?
  • How do we map that API to automation behaviour for a specific platform?
  • How do we make that API accessible via multiple popular programming languages?

There's another, larger, question lurking in the background here too, given that there are more app platforms out there than just iOS and Android:

  • How do we enable automation for all the platforms?

Exploring Appium's answers to these questions may not be the quickest way to learn what Appium is, but it is certainly a good one! So let's dive in.

Appium's choice of API

Appium is very fortunate to have been preceded by a technology which has been a long-standing pioneer in the field of UI automation, namely Selenium. The goal of the Selenium project has been to support UI automation of web browsers, and in this way we can think of it as occupying a subset of Appium's goals. Along the way, Selenium (and, after they merged, another project called WebDriver) developed a relatively stable API for browser automation.

Over the years, Selenium worked with various web browser vendors and the W3C standards group to turn its API into an official web browser standard, called the WebDriver specification. All the main browsers now implement automation capabilities inline with the WebDriver spec, without the Selenium team having to maintain any software that performs actual automation; standards for the win!

Appium's initial goals were to develop an automation standard for mobile apps (iOS and Android). We could have made up something new, but in the spirit of joining forces and keeping standards, well, standard, we decided to adopt the WebDriver spec as Appium's API.2 While user interaction on websites and in mobile native apps are not entirely identical (with even greater differences once we start to consider, for example, TV platforms controlled by simple remotes), the fact is that most software UIs are pretty much the same. This means that the WebDriver spec provides automation API primitives (finding elements, interacting with elements, loading pages or screens, etc...) that more or less map to any platform.

Of course, Appium wants to support the cases where user interaction does differ from web to mobile or web to TV, and so Appium also makes use of the built-in extensibility of the WebDriver spec. The result is that, no matter what platform you want to automate, when you use Appium, you will do so using the standard WebDriver spec, with two caveats:

  • We might not have any way to support a particular WebDriver API command on a given platform, and so some commands might be unsupported (for example, getting or setting cookies is not possible in the world of native mobile app automation).
  • We might support automation behaviours that go beyond what's available in the WebDriver API command list, though any such commands will be valid and spec-compliant extensions to the WebDriver API.

How do you actually use the WebDriver API, particularly in the context of Appium? We'll cover that in the section below on how Appium provides universal programming language access. All you need to know for now is that the way Appium introduces a universal UI automation interface is by implementing the WebDriver protocol.

Platform automation behaviour

The next question is, how does Appium map this protocol to automation behaviour on a wide range of platforms? The trick is that, strictly speaking, Appium doesn't! It leaves this responsibility up to a kind of software module called an Appium driver. There's a whole Driver Introduction which you can read next, so we won't go into huge detail on how they work for now.

What's important to understand at the moment is that a driver is kind of like a pluggable module for Appium that gives Appium the power to automate a particular platform (or set of platforms, depending on the goal of the driver). At the end of the day, a driver's responsibility is to simply implement an Appium-internal interface representing the WebDriver protocol. How it implements this interface is totally up to the driver, based on its strategy for making automation happen on a specific platform. Typically, and with a lot more complexity and difficulty in the details, a driver does this by relying on platform-specific automation technologies. For example, Apple maintains an iOS automation technology called XCUITest. The Appium driver that supports iOS app automation is called the XCUITest Driver because ultimately what it does is convert the WebDriver protocol to XCUITest library calls.

One of the reasons that drivers are independent, pluggable modules is that they work completely differently from one another. The tools and requirements for building and using drivers for different platforms are completely different. And so Appium lets you use just the drivers that you need for your automation tasks. Choosing drivers and installing them so that you can use them with your Appium instance is so important that Appium has its very own CLI for managing drivers.

So, to answer our original question, the way that Appium provides access to automation capabilities for a given platform is that the Appium team (or anyone else3) writes a driver for that platform, implementing as much or little of the WebDriver protocol as desired. The driver can then be installed by anyone using Appium.

Universal programming language access

But what does it mean, or look like, to use Appium, anyway? Since Appium is ultimately a Node.js program, it could have looked like importing Appium and its drivers as libraries into your own Node.js programs. But that wouldn't meet Appium's goal of providing automation capabilities to people using any popular programming language.

Luckily, the fact that Appium rode in on Selenium's coattails meant that we had a solution to this problem from day one. You see, the WebDriver specification is actually an HTTP-based protocol, meaning it is designed to be used over a network rather than within the memory of a single program.

One of the main benefits of this "client-server" architecture is that it allows the automation implementer (the thing doing the automation, in this case the 'server') to be completely distinct from the automation runner (the thing defining what automation should be done, in what steps, etc..., in this case the 'client'). Basically, all the "hard stuff" (actually figuring out how to make automation happen on a given platform) can be handled in one place by the server, and "thin" client libraries can be written in any programming language which simply encode HTTP requests to the server in language-appropriate way. It's possible, in other words, to bring basic Appium / WebDriver capabilities to a new programming language relatively easily, assuming high-level HTTP libraries exist, simply by coding up a basic HTTP client in that language.

There are a couple important takeaways here for you, the Appium user:

  • Appium is an HTTP server. It must run as a process on some computer for as long as you want to be able to use it for automation. It must be accessible on the network to whichever computer you want to use to run the automation from (whether that is the same machine or one across the world).
  • Unless you want to write raw HTTP calls or use cURL, using Appium for automation involves the use of an Appium Client in the language of your choice. The goal of each of these clients is to encapsulate the WebDriver protocol so that rather than worrying about the protocol itself, you can work with objects and methods that feel idiomatic for your language.
  • The Appium server and the Appium client do not need to be running on the same computer. You simply need to be able to send HTTP requests from the client to the server over some network. This greatly facilitates the use of cloud providers for Appium, since they can host the Appium server and any related drivers and devices, and all you need to do is point your client script to their secure endpoints.

And of course, none of this is about "testing" per se, purely about the use of Appium and its client libraries for automation purposes. If you want to do automation for the purpose of "testing", you'll likely want to enlist the help of test runners, test frameworks, and the like, none of which need be related to Appium; one of the benefits of Appium's "universal accessibility" is that it plays well with whatever set of tools you find most beneficial for your situation.

Appium's huge scope

Appium's vision (automation of everything under a single API) is huge! Certainly, much bigger than the team of core maintainers for the open source project. So how does Appium hope to achieve this goal? Basically, by empowering the community to develop functionality on top of Appium as a platform. This is what we call the Appium "ecosystem".

The Appium team does officially maintain a few drivers itself (for example, the XCUITest driver that we spoke about earlier). But it cannot hope to have the platform-specific expertise or the capacity to maintain drivers for many different platforms. But what we have done, particularly beginning with Appium 2.0, is to provide tools to empower the community to join in our vision:

  • Anyone can create a driver simply by creating a Node.js module that conforms to the appropriate conventions and implements any (sub|super)set of the WebDriver protocol. Creating a driver often involves a minimal amount of code because the WebDriver protocol details are abstracted away, and many helper libraries are available---the same libraries that power the Appium team's own drivers.
  • Sharing drivers with others is easy using the Appium driver CLI. There is no central authority. Anyone can share drivers publicly or privately, for free or for sale. Drivers can be open or closed source (though obviously we appreciate open source!).

Appium's vision of being a platform for development extends beyond the support of automation for all app platforms. As a popular automation tool, there are many opportunities for integrating Appium with all kinds of other tools and services. In addition, there are many feature ideas for Appium, either as a core server or in its incarnation across various drivers, which the core team will never have time to build. And so, with Appium 2.0, Appium has released a plugin system that enables anyone to build and share modules that change how Appium works!

In the same way that drivers are easily shareable and consumable via the Appium driver CLI, plugins can be published and consumed via a parallel Plugin CLI. Plugins can do all sorts of things, for example adding the ability for Appium to find and interact with screen regions based on a template image (as in the images plugin). There are very few limitations on what you can do with plugins, so you might also be interested in learning how to Build Plugins in Node.js that can be used with Appium.

So that's Appium: an extensible, universal interface for the UI automation of potentially everything! Read on into some of the specific intro docs for more details, or check out the various guides to dive into some more general concepts and features of Appium.

  1. To meet these primary goals, we also work with a set of secondary goals or methodology principles, which we also encourage for Appium extension developers:

    • As far as possible, rely on (and contribute to) open source technology
    • As far as possible, rely on vendor-provided tools for a given platform
    • As far as possible, rely on automation tools that allow automation of unmodified apps (prefer not to require the user to build in additional SDKs or software that introduce discrepancies between the test version of the app and the production version)
    • As far as possible, rely on existing standards instead of creating new ones

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  2. Technically, when Appium was first written, we were dealing with something older than the WebDriver spec, called the JSON Wire Protocol. Since then, Appium continued to evolve along with the W3C spec and is fully W3C-compliant. ↩

  3. You can build and share your own drivers! Check out Building Drivers to learn more about how to develop drivers in Node.js that can be used with Appium. ↩