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PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

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Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#111

Post by thom_nic »

yebyen wrote: post #78
moxious wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He says in his message it's been a slog for some time, looks like a good time to be done with it. Open source is great, we all like it, but demanding unpaid jobs can get old, too.

And it makes sense. You want Chrome in your tests if your users are using Chrome. Very few (if any) of your users will ever visit your app with a headless PhantomJS browser, so it's not a platform that you should go out of your way to support. I've been using Selenium Driver with Chrome in xvfb for my headless testing needs, and I've used PhantomJS for some automation things in the past where it was great, but since…

I actually started using webdriverIO + chromedriver after fighting too much with casperJS - while webdriver (and Selenium) seem to have much more momentum there are still some things I really miss that PhantomJS gave when using Capybara. I was a very happy Capy+Phantom user when testing my rails apps.

Things like reading the HTTP response code, detecting 404s on assets and catching JS errors in the console are all not possible with Selenium/ Webdriver, and I relied heavily on those capabilities in my Capybara tests.

While headless chrome might be able to replace PhantomJS for many use cases that doesn't necessarily mean the APIs will be comparable. In fact I'd more likely expect the Chrome folks to say "the webdriver API is it, because it's a standard." [1] Sadly IMO it's lacking compared to what PhantomJS was capable of.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver/

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#112

Post by eric_b »

This is a great move. I appreciate what Phantom (and the maintainer) were trying to do, but I have always loathed PhantomJS. It has never worked well. In fact, I'd been away from it for some time, but just last night needed to install it to run some tests and it caused massive frustration.

I pulled a Node repo that ran tests using Karma (why people use Karma is a complete mystery to me). I pulled the repo, ran `npm install` and then `npm test`. Sure enough Karma explodes out of the gate.

Phantom can't start. I'm on Windows 8.1. I debug for an hour, eventually finding a magic custom binary Ariya created. I then have to copy this binary to the `/node_modules/karma-phantom-launcher/node_modules/phantomjs2-ext/bin` directory.

All this to run some Jasmine specs.

If Chrome headless support is really as good as "works just like Chrome without the GUI" then I will be one happy camper.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#113

Post by moogly »

yebyen wrote: post #78
moxious wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He says in his message it's been a slog for some time, looks like a good time to be done with it. Open source is great, we all like it, but demanding unpaid jobs can get old, too.

And it makes sense. You want Chrome in your tests if your users are using Chrome. Very few (if any) of your users will ever visit your app with a headless PhantomJS browser, so it's not a platform that you should go out of your way to support. I've been using Selenium Driver with Chrome in xvfb for my headless testing needs, and I've used PhantomJS for some automation things in the past where it was great, but since…

Thanks so much to the PhantomJS maintainer for his hard work over the years! To me, it feels like his decision is the correct one here.

After we realised that we hadn't seen a "one-browser" bug for 2 years in our massive angularjs app, we got rid of all browsers but PhantomJS in our karma suite. PhantomJS' slowness, lagging-behind in webstandards and just my general gut feeling (these facts above made me question the point in running JavaScript tests in an actual browser at all) made me port our karma test suite to jest w/ jsdom and haven't been happier since we, years prior, got rid of our gnarly Selenium test suite that caught 0 bugs but was the major cause for maintenance headache.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#114

Post by Flenser »

Hernanpm wrote: post #18

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.

Chrome will have headless save to PDF fairly soon: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=603559

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#115

Post by ohitsdom »

jffry wrote: post #84
ohitsdom wrote: post #69

PhantomJS 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?

I can't answer all of your questions, but this thread may interest you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102248

Huge help, thank you!

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#116

Post by joshuaduffy »

eric_b wrote: post #112

This is a great move. I appreciate what Phantom (and the maintainer) were trying to do, but I have always loathed PhantomJS. It has never worked well. In fact, I'd been away from it for some time, but just last night needed to install it to run some tests and it caused massive frustration. I pulled a Node repo that ran tests using Karma (why people use Karma is a complete mystery to me). I pulled the repo, ran `npm i…

I personally use Chrome at the moment as on larger projects PhantomJS as non forgiving with syntax errors and tests will simply fail.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#117

Post by [deleted] »

eric_b wrote: post #112

This is a great move. I appreciate what Phantom (and the maintainer) were trying to do, but I have always loathed PhantomJS. It has never worked well. In fact, I'd been away from it for some time, but just last night needed to install it to run some tests and it caused massive frustration. I pulled a Node repo that ran tests using Karma (why people use Karma is a complete mystery to me). I pulled the repo, ran `npm i…

[deleted]

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#118

Post by VeejayRampay »

avaer wrote: post #32

Open source software has to be one of the least efficient markets out there. If you sum up the very real value PhantomJS has delivered to very real companies over the last several years, napkin math tells me we wouldn't have the project being abandoned for being a "bloody hell" to work on.

No, companies that make billions of dollars in an ecosystem that benefits from said tools and don't pay a dime for the public good are to blame. It's not a problem with open source, it's a problem with a culture that takes and doesn't give back enough.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#119

Post by veidr »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #100
amelius wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, thanks PhantomJS! I'm wondering, are there any examples out there for generating screenshots on headless Chrome?

From the docs it sounds like it is largely compatible with Selenium https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkgr/headle... If that is true, the takeScreenshot() should work as normal hopefully.

I can confirm that. Here's an example of how we take screenshots when automated tests fail, using Selenium + Chrome:

https://gist.github.com/masonmark/2332c1238a2fa70b5e4fcfffdc...

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#120

Post by yeukhon »

akx wrote: post #108
est wrote: post #79

This is sad, phantomjs is better stripped than Chromium headless, if you ever try to install Chromium on servers without X, it requires shit ton of dependencies, while phantomjs was properly modified requires only minimal library.

I don't really see the problem. After all, you just install those deps once in your Dockerfile, right? ;)

Not everyone is using Docker.
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