For many years one of the selling features of the WebdriverIO framework was its synchronous API. Especially for folks coming from more synchronous oriented languages such as Java or Ruby, it has helped to avoid race conditions when executing commands. But also people that are more familiar with Promises tend to prefer synchronous execution as it made the code easier to read and handle.

JW Player is an embeddable, online video player which generates over a billion unique views every day. In order to sustain and grow this scale, the player needs to be able to function on a multitude of different web and mobile platforms. This increases the importance of automated testing to improve confidence in our releases when deploying to so many different targets. After a lengthy project of converting our legacy test framework, which comprised over 6,000 tests, the Test Engineering team at JW Player has been able to deliver more timely releases with fewer regressions. We have experienced no major rollbacks, and increased the confidence we have in the quality of our own product, thanks to WebdriverIO.

Today the WebdriverIO team announced in their OpenJS Foundation Q&A session that the project opens an OpenCollective to allow users and companies to donate to the development of the project and support community members to run WebdriverIO workshops and other types of events. This allows everyone to be paid to work on features and bug fixes as well as help the community to pay for pizza or rental space when hosting WebdriverIO workshops or meetups.