PhantomJS: Archiving the project, suspending development

Well with Chrome going headless there isn't a whole lot of place for PhantomJS anyway. Or is there? What is it still good for?

Two alternatives:

Headless Chrome with Puppeteer: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer

Firefox-based Slimer.js: https://github.com/laurentj/slimerjs (same API as Phantom which is useful if using a higher level library like http://casperjs.org/)

I still think it's premature. There is still couple of fields PhantomJS is better than Headless Chrome. Notably proxy support, and API aviability.

This project has been effectively dead since April 2017, when Vitallium stepped down as maintainer as soon as Headless Chrome was announced [1]:

> Headless Chrome is coming [...] I think people will switch to it, eventually. Chrome is faster and more stable than PhantomJS. And it doesn't eat memory like crazy. [...] I don't see any future in developing PhantomJS. Developing PhantomJS 2 and 2.5 as a single developer is a bloody hell.

One potential path forward could have been to have PhantomJS support Headless Chrome as a runtime [2], which Paul Irish (of Google Chrome team) reached out to PhantomJS about. However, it seems there hasn't been enough interest/resources to ever make this happen.

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/phantomjs/9aI5d-LDuNE/5Z3SMZ...

[2] https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/14954

Legacy systems for one. The Cooperative Patent Classification group releases their classifications en masse as HTML (single zip download, which is great). I built a parser for a PHP project that could parse all several hundred thousand records from the HTML in a few minutes. In 2017, they switched to a system that loads in the data from JSON stored in Javascript in the HTML (it is every bit as terrible as you imagine). Obviously loading in the HTML and trying to use regex to match the JSON was a terrible idea (especially since it was encoded to boot...), so I instead used Phantom to load each file, render it, and save it to a temporary file which I then parse using the original pre-2017 parser. Like 10 lines of code in Phantom to do it.

Obviously with my situation, this is not the end of the world. I use the parser twice a year and Phantom will continue to handle that task just fine. But I also know that the switch to using headless Chrome would be an expensive one if necessary; we have to research it, we have to update local dev environments, we have to implement it, we have to write new tests for it, we have to test it, we have to updating our deployment strategy, update our server deployment configuration, and, worst of all, get all of these changes and new software installations approved by the USPTO which is a nightmare. My situation is simple, but would take several weeks to several months to actually deploy to production. As it stands, I will likely have to explain why we have a now-unmaintained piece of software on the server and may be forced to switch regardless.

I can easily imagine how this project sunsetting, even though there is a clear alternative and successor, could be a nightmare to a lot of people. It's not the end of the world, but it's definitely unfortunate