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

Unit testing with Jasmine

Let's first explore how we can use PhantomJS to run unit tests using Jasmine, JavaScript's testing framework (http://pivotal.github.io/jasmine/). There are several testing frameworks for JavaScript that are freely available to use. Some of the better known testing frameworks are Jasmine, QUnit, and Mocha. Why Jasmine? Jasmine is also one of the more popular testing frameworks.

Besides, Jasmine syntaxes are very much like the English language when used, making it easy to follow and read the content of the test, just like in a document. In this chapter, we will not discuss Jasmine in depth, but only concentrate on those parts that we will need in our code. For more information on how to use the Jasmine API, refer to the Jasmine project page at http://pivotal.github.io/jasmine/.

We will assume that you know about unit testing and are familiar with it. Let's start by creating a simple calculator in JavaScript that has the ability to perform addition,...