[🚀 Feature]: Official statement on Java's PageFactory and support package

[Sveshais]

Feature and motivation

There are several statements scattered around in the Internet and in the issue comments regarding PageFactory being sub-optimal, meant as an example-only and its usage overall is discouraged, e.g.: #10836 (comment)

There are also mentions to phase out support package altogether: #14474 (comment)

This, however, cannot be found easilly and is not reflected in Selenium documentation. On the contrary, there are pages describing several support features, such as Waiting, ExpectedConditions, LoadableComponent etc. suggesting these are officially supported and encouraged features. Last one also refers to PageFactory in examples: Loadable Component

As these are widely used features, it would be very helpful to raise the awareness of any plans regarding their discontinuation by providing an official statement and perhaps pointing to alternative solutions.

Usage example

When I browse official Selenium documentation, I should not be advised to use discouraged or de facto deprecated features. A statement of PageFactory and support package (?) being discouraged would rise awareness an potentially fuel discussions and development of alternative solutions.

[github-actions]

@Sveshais, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

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Thank you!

[shbenzer]

Someone going through the documentation and removing/rewriting sections mentioning deprecated or sub-optimal packages/procedures would be fantastic.

[manoj2690]

Hi @shbenzer , I am interested to contribute.

Since this is my first contribution, I'm going through the contributing guidelines and suggested documents. However, I would like to understand the issue in detail and the next steps to get started.

Please suggest.

[titusfortner]

There is disagreement still on the team about what should and shouldn't be actively supported and what should or shouldn't be actively discouraged. I think the Selenium team needs to decide what we want to do before we ask people to help make changes to things like documentation.

[selenium-ci]

Hi, @Sveshais.

This is related to code in the Support packages. The support packages contain example code that
many users find helpful, but they do not necessarily represent the best practices for using Selenium,
and the Selenium team is not prioritizing work on them right now.
This doesn't mean that we won't ever work on them, but it is not on our roadmap as we push to release Selenium 5.

We actively encourage people to create their own wrapper and helper code that makes sense for them.
If you have any questions, please contact us