Quick intro to nose plugins.
This page is bit of a detour and might be more advanced than we need it to be, but let's talk about nose plugins and how they can relate to Selenium RC.
There's no way to cover the entire nose plugin system in 5 minutes ... it's really more of a 50 minute kind of discussion. However, it's worth mentioning because it's one piece of nose that allows you to be very creative in how to get nose to work for you.
Part of the problem with Selenium RC is that you need to launch the server before you can run any Selenium tests. Sure, you could do this manually but we're lazy people who just want some thing to happen when it needs to happen. Nose plugins allow you to extend nose in the directions you need it to go.
We've used nose plugins to check to see if a Selenium server is running and bootstrap one, and we've also created plugins to allow for the passing in of variables. There are plugins out there to run tests in parallel and others to capture stdout to files .. the point is if nose doesn't do something you need, you can write a plugin to make it happen. (Probably.)
The best places to look for information about nose plugins are:
Fluid 960 Grid System, created by Stephen Bau, based on the 960 Grid System by Nathan Smith. Released under the GPL/ MIT Licenses.