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

CasperJS

With the rising popularity of PhantomJS, there has been an evolution of several projects that integrate with or are based on PhantomJS. Some of these are extensions that enhance the scripting ability of PhantomJS.

CasperJS is an open source extension for PhantomJS. It extends the API of PhantomJS to make tasks such as web scraping, testing, and DOM manipulation easier. CasperJS can be downloaded from http://casperjs.org.

Let us see some basic PhantomJS and CasperJS code in action.

var casper = require("casper").create();
casper.start("http://www.phantomjs.org", function(){
  this.echo(this.getTitle());
});

casper.run();

If you look closely at the previous code, there is no trace of any PhantomJS API code having been used, except for the require() function.

CasperJS still uses PhantomJS and depends on the PhantomJS API; however, it provides its own unique API. CasperJS modules come with a new set of API functions. These functions introduce new features by wrapping...