Book Image

Getting Started with PhantomJS

By : Aries beltran
Book Image

Getting Started with PhantomJS

By: Aries beltran

Overview of this book

PhantomJS is a headless WebKit browser with JavaScript API that allows you to create new ways to automate web testing. PhantomJS is currently being used by a large number of users to help them integrate headless web testing into their development processes. It also gives you developers a new framework to create web-based applications, from simple web manipulation to performance measurement and monitoring.A step step-by by-step guide that will help you develop new tools for solving web and testing problems in an effective and quick way. The book will teach you how to use and maximize PhantomJS to develop new tools for web scrapping, web performance measurement and monitoring, and headless web testing. This book will help you understand PhantomJS’ scripting API capabilities and strengths.This book starts by looking at PhantomJS’ JavaScript API, features, and basic execution of scripts. Throughout the book, you will learn details to help you write scripts to manipulate web documents and fully create a web scrapping tool.Through its practical approach, this book strives to teach you by example, where each chapter focuses on the common and practical usage of PhantomJS, and how to extract meaningful information from the web and other services.By the end of the book, you will have acquired the skills to enable you to use PhantomJS for web testing, as well as learning the basics of Jasmine, and how it can be used with PhantomJS.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
12
Index

The phantom object

The phantom object is your reference to PhantomJS within your scripts that allows you to access certain properties and provides functionality that affects the entire script (such as quitting the application as previously mentioned.) The phantom object can be directly referenced anywhere in the script and does not need to be explicitly imported. You may also access it as a child of the global window object.

The phantom object allows access to relevant data, such as cookies and library paths. If we want to import or inject third-party JavaScript libraries, such as jQuery, we can do that using the phantom object. We can also create a "catch all" event handler for errors using the onError event of the phantom object.

PhantomJS not only allows us to harness the power of JavaScript but also gives us a very useful API. Each day, more and more contributors are enhancing this API, giving us more options and easier ways to solve real problems. We will learn more about these APIs as we continue our journey learning about PhantomJS.