PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer • Hacker News Board

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#11

Post by ajholyoake » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 10:20 AM UTC

redsummer wrote: post #4

I'm curious - What is the utility of headless browsers? Are there people who earn money by getting it to automatically fill out forms, enter competitions etc?

I have used them in the past to convert graphs and reports to JPGs and PDFs so that I can automatically email them to people in the company who are unable (or unwilling) to use a web page.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#12

Post by askmike » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 10:20 AM UTC

Though a collaboration between the two projects might not be out of the question: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/phantomjs-dev/S-mEBwuSgKQ/PQ...

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#13

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 10:20 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#14

Post by z3t4 » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 10:20 AM UTC

> I even bought the Mac for that!

I did too, then found out you also needed a dev license for users being able to run your app. Supporting Mac/OSX is damn expensive if your app is free.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#15

Post by d--b » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 10:22 AM UTC

redsummer wrote: post #4

I'm curious - What is the utility of headless browsers? Are there people who earn money by getting it to automatically fill out forms, enter competitions etc?

I use it to automate turning webpages in pdf.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#16

Post by avaer » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 10:23 AM UTC

redsummer wrote: post #4

I'm curious - What is the utility of headless browsers? Are there people who earn money by getting it to automatically fill out forms, enter competitions etc?

Testing, rendering, scraping, streaming, botting, and many more.

Think "what could I accomplish with a browser, with the slow human replaced by a fast program" and let your imagination run wild.

The space is interesting enough that people have jumped through a lot of hoops to make it work in the past; this makes it one less hoop.

Oh, and if you ever wondered why web captchas are a thing, one of the reasons is headless browsers.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#17

Post by mvitorino » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 10:23 AM UTC

redsummer wrote: post #4

I'm curious - What is the utility of headless browsers? Are there people who earn money by getting it to automatically fill out forms, enter competitions etc?

Server side automation of multiple kinds (not just tests): screenshots, advanced crawlers, etc.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#18

Post by Hernanpm » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 10:30 AM UTC

Besides testing, my team uses phantomjs to convert pages to PDF and also to convert javascript generated charts to images. This is sad news, I'm don't think chrome eventually will add support for.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#19

Post by chatmasta » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 10:31 AM UTC

That sucks for any scraping use case. I have to imagine google has built in some way to detect headless browser mode serverside, even if only they can access it.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#20

Post by demonshalo » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 10:33 AM UTC

redsummer wrote: post #4

I'm curious - What is the utility of headless browsers? Are there people who earn money by getting it to automatically fill out forms, enter competitions etc?

A great example would be PDF generation for things like invoices. Rather than generating a pdf with something like PHP or Java. Render a regular html page with all the css you want (super easy compared to drawing a PDF using PHP) and then proceed to use a pdf printer on that page.

You could run such a thing as a microservice using a headless browser or PhantomJS. There are probably better ways to do this but that's one of the first things that popped into my head!