When writing protractor tests you will be dealing with two libraries:
- Jasmine: http://jasmine.github.io/
- Protractor: https://angular.github.io/protractor/#/
- Selenium Webdriver: http://www.seleniumhq.org/projects/webdriver/
The Jasmine syntax is the same used on unit tests: beforeEach(), describe(), it(), and so on
When running end-to-end with Selenium, you are controling a real browser. The methods specifcs to the webdriver will do all sort of browser interaction, such as: going to an URL, refreshing the page and so on. But for Angular applications, it is important that Selenium respect Angular timing: by waiting for it to render. For this reason, Protractor has a set of methods under the object browser that wraps the main Selenium functionalties and make it work better with Angular.
You will not be using Selenium WebDriver methods, but Protractor's browser object instead.
When writting end-to-end tests for Angular, it is difficult to tell when the application is done with updating the scope. That is why the Angular team created Protractor: to give you a simple way to test values without worring about digest loop.
Using protractor, you can interact with DOM elements as usual in a end-to-end test, but you can also retrive scope values with easy.
The main difference between unit tests and Protractor Methods is that Protractor's return promises. You define which scope value you want to retrive with the method element(by.binding('scopeValue')). Then, whenever the Angular app is finished with digest loops, Protractor solves the promise with the last scope value.