Is there a benefit to using a specific language with Selenium WebDriver?

Question

As I begin to make the leap from the Firefox Selenium IDE to Selenium 2, I'm realizing that a significant portion of tutorials, guides, books, and documentation regarding WebDriver is based in Java; C# seems to take a somewhat close second.

• Is there a benefit to one language (C#, Java, Python, Ruby) over the other?

• Does the chosen IDE (Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc.) of the language play a significant role in its application of Selenium 2?

• Should the language of the project being tested play a pivotal role in determining what language is chosen to run Selenium 2 in? (In other words, if the dev team is writing in C# .NET should I, the SQA dev, run WebDriver in C# too?)

Answer 1

Regarding the language it probably does not matter. Just choose the one you're most comfortable with. With C# and Visual Studio you can use combine Selenium and Specflow which may help writing the tests.

I'd say it is probably useful that the language that the language of the SQA dev uses is the same as the dev team just because that way the dev team may be more able to support the test developer and you may also get more people that can maintain the developed tests and write more tests. For example what if the SQA leaves and he was the only one using Java when the dev team used C#?