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PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

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Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#121

Post by mycomian »

atemerev wrote: post #73
azernik wrote: post #44

Earlier 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.

The question is reversed: open source software _is_ a positive externality, but happened almost always _without_ any government involvement (save for some rare exceptions like SELinux). This is probably the reason it worked so good. So, do we necessarily need governments for other positive externalities in the list?

It's absolutely not a necessity, but more incentive for writing OSS could be nice.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#125

Post by SigmundA »

asdfgadsfgasfdg wrote: post #89
demonshalo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

This sounds horrible.. In general all these html->pdf ways of generating pdfs sounds horrible -- why don't people use latex for this?

Because you probably already did the layout work in HTML to display on screen to the user and now just want a PDF version of it.

Or you can redo the layout in latex and maintain two layouts.

The full print css is actually pretty complete, problem is the only browser that fully supports it is PrinceXML. None of the major browsers seem to care much about print layout.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#126

Post by tokenizerrr »

acdha wrote: post #101
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #75

> Chrome is faster and more stable than PhantomJS. And it doesn't eat memory like crazy. Wait, can someone tell me where to download this doesn't-eat-memory-like-crazy version of Chrome? Activity Monitor is showing me 2GB of Chrome processes right now and that's even with The Great Suspender having paused almost all my tabs.

Disable your extensions one by one until you identify the one leaking memory.

Or just look at the chrome process manager. Shift+Esc

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#127

Post by tyingq »

imr_ wrote: post #56
hpaavola wrote: post #25

Also Firefox will get headless mode in few releases https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1338004

thank god. I was afraid we will be back in the grasp of the google's moloch.

Curious what "moloch" means in this context. I can google it, of course, but I get "Biblical name relating to a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice". Which doesn't help me much. End users are children that Google is sacrificing? Or?

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#128

Post by tokenizerrr »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #36
z3t4 wrote: post #14

> 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.

For iOS development I believe they got rid of that requirement, you can develop iOS apps (at least) using a personal dev account; only when you want to go to the app store do they ask for the license fee.

How do I do this without buying dedicated hardware?

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#129

Post by sjtgraham »

tomp wrote: post #46
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 wrote a PhantomJS script to download data from my bank accounts. They offer no API and disfunctional text-based exports, their websites are ridden with "good" (=terrible) web & security practices, like 3-characters-of-the-whole-password authentication, single-tab sessions, frames, etc. that makes it pretty much impossible to scrape with Python but relatively easy with a fully-fledged browser (although that still re…

Who do you bank with?

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#130

Post by jonny_eh »

hackits wrote: post #80
taude wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think open source tooling has no such hurdles? At these same "larger" companies, they're going to have an open source review board, and legal involved for each open source product you want to use. Just because you can download and use it on your local machine, doesn't mean you're not violating your corp policy and procedure.

Whats more surprising is the company I work for does have a support agreement with Oracle, although when we've run into problems that do need a technical expert from Oracle such as crash dumps and stack traces we're told to figure it out our-self. Kind of defeats the whole reason to have a closed source system when you're still on the hook and charging out $500 per hour to clients.

and then you can't search stackoverflow for help, compared to using something like postgres
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