Naive question here. What makes headless mode so difficult?
PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
61–70 of 236 posts
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every UK bank I've used allows some format of csv/qif/ofx export. Are you in the US?
They generally do. But many UK banks make it hard to automate things. Either insisting on 2FA in all cases, or having a secondary login without 2FA that only gives very limited access. Some way of authorising API access to read-only access to things like statements would be fantastic, to the extent that I'd consider changing banks over it, if you know of any UK banks that offer it.
As well, most bank OFX/CSV exports I've dealt with are truncated in some ways (e.g. truncated labels), which make it harder to really leverage sometimes.
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a classic "public good" - an economic activity whose benefits are impractical or unworthwhile to deny to those who don't pay. Things like emergency services, last-mile road infrastructure, and environmental protection work. A special-case of positive externalities. These are a classic example used by economists of a natural place for government in the economy.
Which makes me wonder why governments don't give more grants for writing open source code. They do it for research, which is another thing that would otherwise probably not pay for itself. I guess if they started doing it a lot of commercial companies would complain to them about the competition.
Governments do fund some things directly – most commonly grants to specific interests – but one other area which helps is allowing staff to work on open-source projects. At least in the United States civil servants’ work is generally considered public domain so we don't have to deal with the IP concerns which many companies still obsess over, which is nice.
If you poke around https://government.github.com/community you'll find a lot of government created projects but checking those organizations/ contributors will often turn up a ton of forks of popular tools. One common thing is improving security defaults or accessibility, which are tedious but mandatory for government.
If you value this, make sure to let your elected representatives know: I'm sure they hear from the major contractors regularly.
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#64I'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?
My favorite use is automated browser testing. Examples:
- in Ruby, poltergeist (https://github.com/teampoltergeist/poltergeist)
- in Elixir, hound (https://github.com/HashNuke/hound)
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#65Also Firefox will get headless mode in few releases https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1338004
And while people wait, you can already do a 'poor mans' headless Firefox thanks to SlimerJS and xvfb.
Phantomjs is less resource heavy if you're constantly spooling up and down lots of instances but I prefer SlimerJS w/ Firefox since it lets you keep up to date with a modern version of Firefox (rather than relying on sporadic QTWebkit updates from Phantomjs).
If you're using Casperjs, SlimerJS is virtually a drop in replacement for Phantomjs (though I worry about how long/well Casperjs will continue to be maintained).
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#66I'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 https://github.com/bfirsh/needle/blob/master/README.md for automated UI regression testing. Using a headless browser means your test suite can run faster and with fewer dependencies.
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#67Naive question here. What makes headless mode so difficult?
It's the same order of magnitude of work, as it is maintaining a fully-fledged browser. It's sad to see open-source projects shut down, but being a sole developer is a lot different than having the resources of a giant like Google, for example.
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#68Wow, that was a quick reaction. Thanks to the maintainers for all the good work! To me, it's always a sad occasion to see diversity diminished. Nothing against Chromium, but I hope it won't be the one browser to rule them all. It's always good to have alternatives.
They know since June about the project. This is an interesting conversation:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/phantomjs-dev/S-mEBw...
( posted by askmike in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14105613 )
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#69PhantomJS is a great tool, I implemented it as a PDF report generating system. But will Chromium be able to replace it in this regard? Will Chromium have paging features? Will it be able to repeat table headers when a table body content extends to the next page?
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#70Besides 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.
We recently ended up using NightmareJS with xvfb in Debian Docker image to produce high fidelity PDF's.
Seems to work well so far.