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

Opening a web page

In a normal browser, opening a web page means typing a URL and letting the browser render the document fetched. It works almost the same way in PhantomJS, except that we don't actually wait for the page to be rendered before our eyes. Everything is done in a non-visual way. We don't see text, high-resolution images, or even animation on the page. We don't see anything that will show up on the screen.

We also do not type the URL in the address bar as we do in a normal browser. We create scripts to load the page. We learned in the previous chapter that to access a URL or a page in PhantomJS, we need to use the WebPage API.

var page = require('webpage').create();
page.open("http://www.packtpub.com", function(status) {
  if ( status === "success" ) {
    console.log("Page is loaded.");
    phantom.exit(0);
  }
});

And that's how we open a page in PhantomJS. So what now? We don't use PhantomJS just to browse a...