isElementPresent in Selenium-2.0

Recently while going through Selenium-2.0 I found out that WebDriver does not have a function called isElementPresent(). This was one of the important functions that was used in Selenium-1.0. It was mainly used for waiting for an element to be available to take an action on it. To implement this in WebDriver you just need to write a method as mentioned below. You can then  use this function with any type of "By"(By.id, BY.name, etc.)

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private boolean isElementPresent(WebDriver driver, By by){   try{    driver.findElement(by);    return true;   }catch(NoSuchElementException e){    return false;   }  }

The above function will return true in case the element is found on the page, else it will return false. For ex. The above function can be used for implementing thewaitForElementPresent function of Selenium-IDE as mentioned below.

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for (int second = 0;; second++) {    if (second >= 60) fail("timeout");    try { if (this.isElementPresent(driver,By.linkText("Software testing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"))) break;    Thread.sleep(1000);     } catch (Exception e) {}   }