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PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

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Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#211

Post by nulagrithom »

taude wrote: post #206
nulagrithom wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They're also afraid of the abomination you quickly scripted together that the future-you, who no longer works for them, then has to try and figure out.

ffs it's just FTP. All it needed was a scheduled task that called winscp pointed to a file containing a handful of flat FTP commands. If the guy who replaces me can't sort that out, how's he going to sort through my code?

Besides, now it's some abomination wrapped inside a proprietary program that doesn't work right in the first place, only this time we're out the $x,xxx licensing costs and the entire process is opaque, with absolutely zero hope of sorting it out on our own. That's not a huge gain...

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#212

Post by azernik »

chimeracoder wrote: post #97
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.

> It's a classic "public good" - an economic activity whose benefits are impractical or unworthwhile to deny to those who don't pay. Open source software is not a public good, in the economic sense. There are two criteria for being a public good: non-rivalry and non-excludability. Open-source software satisfies the first criterion (my using it doesn't prevent you from using it), but it's fairly excludable (I can prev…

Non-excludability isn't just about the law; it's about practicality. It might in some system be legal to prevent fire services from putting out fires in houses that haven't paid for it, but that would be an impractical system.

Similarly, critical software intended for developers is impractical to deny to them; doing so has some serious negative effects on the production process (hard to get good feedback/PRs from customers, for example, unless you expose the source to them to a level that closed-source manufacturers find dangerous to their business model).

WRT the original commons, you can make such things work in a tight-knit community that can enforce social norms (which, by the way, would take on a lot of what are now considered "government functions" in a modern society), but in a larger capitalist economy with actors that aren't inside the community, the government is the only actor that has the authority to enforce public ownership of the commons.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#213

Post by pvg »

philh wrote: post #207
pvg wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a term that's been kicking around literature for centuries. It's in Paradise Lost, for cryin' out loud. Why on earth would its use be a references to some random prolix internet dude's weird verbal recreation of the La Brea Tar Pits?

Like I say, I don't know that it is. I presented a hypothesis that seems like it fits the facts fairly well. Do you have another hypothesis about what the term means in context? I note that "it's a reference to Paradise Lost" is not very descriptive: for example, if I talked about "Google's Frodo" you might ask what I mean by that, and "he's a character in Lord of the Rings" does not answer the question.

I don't really have to have a hypothesis, it's not that uncommon a term. It's used for all sorts of things including a fairly generalized 'insatiable and demanding metaphorical monster'. If someone offhandedly mentions Icarus it seems reasonable to assume they're not really alluding to a review of the Hungarian brand of buses posted to alt.rec.bus in 1991.

Take a look at, say,

http://www.nybooks.com/search/?s=moloch&option_match=&year_a...

Lots and lots of Moloch. Your hypothesis is 'it's a reference to some logorrheic blogger'. Sure, it's possible you're right but it's one hell of a weirdly specific guess. It's not like the three people to ever mention Moloch were Milton, Ginsberg and internet-man-addicted-to-his-own-typing.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#214

Post by erik »

thom_nic wrote: post #111
yebyen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

When I looked into it, I was surprised by how hard it is to set up basic smoke tests for web development, and that Selenium / Webdriver can't do this.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#215

Post by logn »

I maintain a web driver too (Selenium-based) and have been wondering about how it would compare to Selenium ChromeDriver headless. Mine is built in Java and uses Java's embedded WebKit. If anyone has feedback this is where I'm discussing it, https://github.com/MachinePublishers/jBrowserDriver/issues/2...

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#216

Post by spiderjerusalem »

edoloughlin wrote: post #159
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.

Open source software has to be one of the least efficient markets out there Does it have to be a market?

Amen. Somehow a lot of comments in this thread are blinded to the fact that the 'commons' are not simply subsumed within the 'market'. The logic of commons is quite orthogonal to that of markets.

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#217

Post by [deleted] »

pvg wrote: post #213
philh wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I say, I don't know that it is. I presented a hypothesis that seems like it fits the facts fairly well. Do you have another hypothesis about what the term means in context? I note that "it's a reference to Paradise Lost" is not very descriptive: for example, if I talked about "Google's Frodo" you might ask what I mean by that, and "he's a character in Lord of the Rings" does not answer the question.

I don't really have to have a hypothesis, it's not that uncommon a term. It's used for all sorts of things including a fairly generalized 'insatiable and demanding metaphorical monster'. If someone offhandedly mentions Icarus it seems reasonable to assume they're not really alluding to a review of the Hungarian brand of buses posted to alt.rec.bus in 1991. Take a look at, say, http://www.nybooks.com/search/?s=moloch&…

[deleted]

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#219

Post by JimTheDev »

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.

I wrote a bit about how you can get started here using Node: https://objectpartners.com/2017/04/13/how-to-install-and-use...

Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

#220

Post by kingosticks »

vidarh wrote: post #45
pricechild wrote: post #33

Earlier 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.

Monzo will be offering current accounts soon.

https://monzo.com/blog/2017/04/05/banking-licence/

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