PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer • Hacker News Board

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#171

Post by krzyk » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 4:24 PM UTC

franciscop wrote: post #145

IMO it'd be a really smart move for Google to hire Vitaly to help with the launching of this feature and things around it. He has done a great job with PhantomJS. Even an acquisition [1] of PhantomJS would totally make sense, then let him keep working on it but based on headless Chrome and with real resources. [1] Careful how you spin it for this route, learn from TJ/Express https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/stronglo…

Could you elaborate on the TJ/Express? The post you provided looks like the last one of series of events.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#172

Post by lurker456 » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 4:26 PM UTC

nulagrithom wrote: post #146

hackits wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This problem was well demonstrated at my shop the other day. There's a lot of fear of open source here. We needed to run a simple FTP process. I said I'd write a short script. "You've gotta be careful with those free tools though... Never know what will happen when they break. You can't get any support. Besides, we need logging and alerting too." "Oh, $currentTool does logging and alerting?" "Well, yes... But it's cu…

Open source doesn't allow you to pass the buck. Commercial software with support contracts does. There is also the "look how much we're paying! it must be good" factor.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#173

Post by nrook » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 4:28 PM UTC

Is there any way to donate to the PhantomJS project? This seems like a good time to throw some money their way, in thanks for what the maintainers (mostly Vitaly over the past few months, at least, it looks like) have done.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#174

Post by egeozcan » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 4:31 PM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #96

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.

Yeah, I really think that open-source software shot itself in the foot by incorporating unlimited free sharing for every recipient into its mantra. Now everyone thinks that open-source has to mean impoverished, because despite all the happy vibes, very few people will pay for software that they could otherwise get for free. You can make your software "source available", i.e., not open-source under activist definition…

There's no shared source license which bans commercial usages but I think the software industry desperately needs one. I'm selling the software and want to enable the user to make modifications for private use and even share those modifications if they so desire = I have to hire a lawyer and hope he comes up with something that stands the test of a trial.

Not giving away something for free (as in freedom) but asking for free legal advice may sound ironic but it's not about the money, it's about having something reliable for a very common use case.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#175

Post by cr0sh » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 4:32 PM UTC

slig wrote: post #90

tomp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If your bank has a mobile app, it might be easier to MITM and figure out their API and use it directly.

That actually sounds like it could run you into legal issues (or worse), depending on your location (ie - access to a computer system without permission; they give you permission to use the app on the phone, but maybe not to use the API directly). YMMV.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#176

Post by aantix » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 4:33 PM UTC

nashashmi wrote: post #95

Anybody know how to port code from using PhantomJS to headless Chrome? I have been using CasperJS that wraps to PhantomJS. PhantomJS had its own set of commands. headless chrome will have to be different one way or another.

Looks like it's already usable?

"Use headless chromium with capybara and selenium webdriver - today!" -- March 30th

http://blog.faraday.io/headless-chromium-with-capybara-and-s...

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#177

Post by ionwake » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 4:35 PM UTC

nurettin wrote: post #170

draw_down wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I had the same thought. Just because you have a ton of experience that suggests you'd be good at doing a job doesn't mean a tech company would do something silly like hire you for that job.

Furthermore, you may simply be uninterested in the sort of tasks google might give you.

Like inverting binary trees

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#178

Post by IneffablePigeon » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 4:36 PM UTC

asdfgadsfgasfdg wrote: post #152

SigmundA wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But HTML layout is very different to page based layout. HTML is responsive and has no concept of pagination. PDF is paginated and has no concept of responsiveness.

CSS2 has the concept of paged layouts: https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/page.html

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#179

Post by vor0nwe » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 4:38 PM UTC

corford wrote: post #65

hpaavola wrote: post #25

Also 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…

I'm actually hoping CasperJS will support headless Chrome, and headless Firefox later on too.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#180

Post by neebz » Thu, Apr 13, 2017, 4:41 PM UTC

Globz wrote: post #104

PhantomJS enabled us at the time to bootstrap a big project at work where at the end workflow the app had to turn HTML orders to PDF on the fly, eventually we moved to WKHTMLTOPDF ( https://wkhtmltopdf.org/ ) which is much less hungry with resources but nonetheless PhantomJS played a huge role during the early days of the project and was easy to setup. If I remember correctly the only down side was to find the correc…

We have used PhantomJS and WKHTMLTOPDF both. Phantomjs hogs a lot of resources but is very good when you want print large PDFs (500+ pages). WKHTMLTOPDF struggles with larger HTMLs.