Sauce Labs has applied its own secret sauce to Selenium test construction. Sauce Builder, released today, is the culmination of collaboration between the creators of the Windmill Web test framework and the Selenium-focused Sauce Labs team. The resulting Web application test development environment offers a streamlined experience where knowledge of Selenium coding is not required.

Jason Huggins, executive software chief at Sauce Labs, said that Sauce Builder came out of the merging of work from Windmill’s Adam Christian and a now-defunct testing project known as Go Test It. (Christian now works at Sauce Labs.)

Huggins said that Go Test It was essentially a more powerful version of Windmill, and Christian’s own work was in creating a simple-to-use IDE for writing Windmill tests. After much work in that direction, Sauce Builder was born.

This open-source project, said Huggins, takes the best ideas from Windmill and Go Test It and applies them to Selenium. He said that this is a departure from the existing standard test-creation tool, Selenium IDE.

“Selenium IDE was very XUL-specific, very Firefox-only,” said Huggins. “A common request was for Internet Explorer support. The IDE project was so Firefox-specific, it would have been a complete rewrite.”

That movement away from the Firefox-specific UI language, XUL, will allow Sauce Builder to expand its capabilities to more browsers, said Huggins. Yet, even with this on the road map, it’s too early to give Sauce Builder the honorific title of Selenium IDE 2.0.

“We would like it to be Selenium Builder, but we don’t want to be so presumptuous,” he said. “We’d love it if it is accepted as Selenium IDE 2.0. If not, it’ll still be out there.”

Another focus of Sauce Builder is ease of use. Huggins said it is targeted at developers who don’t know how to write Selenium tests by hand.

“Half of the Selenium community only knows Selenium through the IDE,” he said. “There are really geeky developers [writing tests] with Python, Ruby or Java, and that’s talking to us through the API. That’s great, but Builder also serves that other half of the community.”

Sauce Builder can also export tests in those languages, said Huggins.