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PhantomJS 2.0 is getting ready for release

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Re: PhantomJS 2.0 is getting ready for release

#3

Post by pothibo »

josephmecham wrote: post #2

Excellent! I have used PhantomJS for web scraping but as that is always a gray area of legality. I'd love to hear any other major uses you've seen it used for. I always love it when I find that a tool I'm using can be used for other purposes.

I once wanted to do automated testing with it. But because PhantomJS used an old webkit version, I couldn't :(

But that's one use case where I would love to use phantomJS or any other headless engine to test the frontend. I'm aware that for headless testing to work, there should be a headless browser of every major vendor. Maybe it's an utopia.

Re: PhantomJS 2.0 is getting ready for release

#4

Post by weego »

josephmecham wrote: post #2

Excellent! I have used PhantomJS for web scraping but as that is always a gray area of legality. I'd love to hear any other major uses you've seen it used for. I always love it when I find that a tool I'm using can be used for other purposes.

Primarily scraping of comet/ajax updating sites of course, but also some interesting uses for testing - crawling a site taking screenshots and then comparing screenshots across releases looking for layout bugs was quite a fun thing. The same principle as https://github.com/BBC-News/wraith

Re: PhantomJS 2.0 is getting ready for release

#6

Post by serve_yay »

pothibo wrote: post #3
josephmecham wrote: post #2

Excellent! I have used PhantomJS for web scraping but as that is always a gray area of legality. I'd love to hear any other major uses you've seen it used for. I always love it when I find that a tool I'm using can be used for other purposes.

I once wanted to do automated testing with it. But because PhantomJS used an old webkit version, I couldn't :( But that's one use case where I would love to use phantomJS or any other headless engine to test the frontend. I'm aware that for headless testing to work, there should be a headless browser of every major vendor. Maybe it's an utopia.

Yes, my team ran directly into the old webkit version issue as well. Does this 2.0 still use an old WebKit? Having trouble finding out...

Edit: it appears to be WebKit 538.1, from May 2014. But this is based on a readme which is pretty old, so it could be outdated info

Re: PhantomJS 2.0 is getting ready for release

#7

Post by simlevesque »

serve_yay wrote: post #6
pothibo wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once wanted to do automated testing with it. But because PhantomJS used an old webkit version, I couldn't :( But that's one use case where I would love to use phantomJS or any other headless engine to test the frontend. I'm aware that for headless testing to work, there should be a headless browser of every major vendor. Maybe it's an utopia.

Yes, my team ran directly into the old webkit version issue as well. Does this 2.0 still use an old WebKit? Having trouble finding out... Edit: it appears to be WebKit 538.1, from May 2014. But this is based on a readme which is pretty old, so it could be outdated info

I have solved this problem by using SlimerJS as an alternative.

Re: PhantomJS 2.0 is getting ready for release

#8

Post by pothibo »

serve_yay wrote: post #6
pothibo wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once wanted to do automated testing with it. But because PhantomJS used an old webkit version, I couldn't :( But that's one use case where I would love to use phantomJS or any other headless engine to test the frontend. I'm aware that for headless testing to work, there should be a headless browser of every major vendor. Maybe it's an utopia.

Yes, my team ran directly into the old webkit version issue as well. Does this 2.0 still use an old WebKit? Having trouble finding out... Edit: it appears to be WebKit 538.1, from May 2014. But this is based on a readme which is pretty old, so it could be outdated info

It uses a new version of Webkit(That includes DOM Mutation Events IIRC). But I believe that they always ship with their own version of webkit, which will always be behind.

For PhantomJS 2.0, I think they ship with a version of webkit that is > 6 months old.

Re: PhantomJS 2.0 is getting ready for release

#9

Post by greensoap »

josephmecham wrote: post #2

Excellent! I have used PhantomJS for web scraping but as that is always a gray area of legality. I'd love to hear any other major uses you've seen it used for. I always love it when I find that a tool I'm using can be used for other purposes.

I use it to let my linux-based custom digital picture frame automatically pull photos from my IOS photostream. This is insecure because it requires that my photos are temporarily public, but it gets the job done.

Re: PhantomJS 2.0 is getting ready for release

#10

Post by warfangle »

pothibo wrote: post #8
serve_yay wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, my team ran directly into the old webkit version issue as well. Does this 2.0 still use an old WebKit? Having trouble finding out... Edit: it appears to be WebKit 538.1, from May 2014. But this is based on a readme which is pretty old, so it could be outdated info

It uses a new version of Webkit(That includes DOM Mutation Events IIRC). But I believe that they always ship with their own version of webkit, which will always be behind. For PhantomJS 2.0, I think they ship with a version of webkit that is > 6 months old.

They don't ship with their own version of webkit; they use qtwebkit (or at least used to?).
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