How to use startDesktopMirroring method of org.openqa.selenium.chromium.Interface HasCasting class

You can use the Selenium or Appium without any server. Both are plugins, which means they are basically open code or libraries. You call those objects on your local machine (or phone), you don't call an online remote API.

The Selenium and Appium helps to find elements on a web page or to find elements inside a mobile app. There is absolutely no need for a server here or remote machine.

So, YES, just add the lib which gives you access to api's like you showed above.

Take a look at the section about filling in forms using webdriver in the selenium documentation and the javadoc for the Select class.

To select an option based on the label:

Select select = new Select(driver.findElement(By.xpath("//path_to_drop_down")));
select.deselectAll();
select.selectByVisibleText("Value1");

To get the first selected value:

WebElement option = select.getFirstSelectedOption()

You are absolutely right that incidental and often changing details in the produced scripts is the biggest problem of record-and-playback automation. You can obviously remove the details from the scripts after recording, but in my opinion it's better to build reusable libraries and code scripts manually from the start.

A good alternative for coding scripts using "real" programming languages is using some higher level automation framework such as Robot Framework that you mentioned. As you speculated, Robot's reusable keywords and also variables make extracting details away from tests very easy. The test cases in SeleniumLibrary's demo illustrates this very well and the demo also shows how to use Selenium through Robot.

You also asked about Sikuli. I've never used it myself but it sure looks interesting. You might be interested on this great how-to that explains how to use it through Robot Framework.

If you replace

//Update the value of cell
cell = sheet.getRow(row).getCell(col);
cell.setCellValue("Pass");

With

//Retrieve the row and check for null
HSSFRow sheetrow = sheet.getRow(row);
if(sheetrow == null){
    sheetrow = sheet.createRow(row);
}
//Update the value of cell
cell = sheetrow.getCell(col);
if(cell == null){
    cell = sheetrow.createCell(col);
}
cell.setCellValue("Pass");

It will work!

You can do this by finding the x and y coordinates of the checkbox in reCAPTCHA and click the element.

WebElement captcha = driver.findElement(By.xpath("html/body/div[1]/div[3]/div[2]/form/div[5]/div"));
        builder.moveToElement(captcha, 50, 30).click().build().perform();

Try using JavaScript like below:

WebElement radioBtn1 = driver.findElement(By.id("radioButton1"));
((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript("arguments[0].checked = true;", radioBtn1);

If you are using QMetry Automation Framework, you should create custom radio button component like where you can override click method with such custom implementation.

As a rule of thumb, try to select more elements by one query, if possible. Searching for many elements one-by-one will get seriously slow.

If I understand your needs well, a good way to do this would be using

driver.findElement(By.id("someId::button")).click();
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[contains(@id, 'someId--popup::popupItem') " +
    "and text()='" + myDesiredValue + "']"))
    .click();

For more information about XPath, see the spec. It's surprisingly a very good read if you can skip the crap!

That finds and clicks an element with text equal to you desired value which contains "someId--popup::popupItem" in its ID.

List<WebElement> list = driver.findElements(By.xpath("//*[contains(@id, 'someId--popup::popupItem')]"));

That finds all just all elements that contain "someId--popup::popupItem" in their ID. You can then traverse the list and look for your desired element.

Did you know you can call findElement() on a WebElement to search just it's children? - driver.findElement(By.id("someId")).findElements(By.className("clickable"))

Without a peek on the underlying HTML, I guess I can't offer the best approach, but I have some in my head.

Did you try disabling the developer extensions with command line param?

Try with the following Selenium WebDriver java code:

System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "D:\\chromedriver.exe");
ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.addArguments("--disable-extensions");
driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

FluentWait and WebDriverWait both are the implementations of Wait interface.

The goal to use Fluent WebDriver Explicit Wait and WebDriver Explicit Wait is more or less same. However, in few cases, FluentWait can be more flexible. Since both the classes are the implementations of same Wait interface so more or less both have the same feature except The FluentWait has a feature to accept a predicate or a function as an argument in until method. On the other hand, WebDriverWait accepts only function as an ExpectedCondition in until method which restricts you to use a boolean return only.When you use Predicate in FluentWait, it allows you to return any Object from until method.

Look at here carefully: https://seleniumhq.github.io/selenium/docs/api/java/org/openqa/selenium/support/ui/FluentWait.html#until-com.google.common.base.Predicate-

Examples: A FluentWait having Function as an argument in until with String return:

public void exampleOfFluentWait() {
        WebElement foo = driver.findElement(By.id("foo"));
        new FluentWait<WebElement>(foo)
            .withTimeout(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
            .pollingEvery(2, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
                    .until(new Function<WebElement, String>() {
                        @Override
                        public String apply(WebElement element) {
                            return element.getText();
                        }
                    });
    }

The Same FluentWait having Function with Boolean return as an argument in until method.

public void exampleOfFluentWait() {
            WebElement foo = driver.findElement(By.id("foo"));
            new FluentWait<WebElement>(foo)
                .withTimeout(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
                .pollingEvery(2, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
                        .until(new Function<WebElement, Boolean>() {
                            @Override
                            public Boolean apply(WebElement element) {
                                return element.getText().contains("foo");
                            }
                        });
        }

One more FluentWait with Predicate.

public void exampleOfFluentWithPredicate() {
    WebElement foo = driver.findElement(By.id("foo"));
    new FluentWait<WebElement>(foo)
        .withTimeout(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
        .pollingEvery(100, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS)
                .until(new Predicate<WebElement>() {
                    @Override
                    public boolean apply(WebElement element) {
                        return element.getText().endsWith("04");
                    }
                });
}

Example of WebDriverWait:

public void exampleOfWebDriverWait() {
        WebElement foo = driver.findElement(By.id("foo"));

        new WebDriverWait(driver, 10)
        .pollingEvery(2, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
        .withTimeout(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
        .until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOf(foo));
    }