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

Playing with DOM elements

There are a lot of things we can do with the page we are accessing beyond getting the title of the document, and this can be done with a little help from the Document Object Model API. We are not going to discuss each object and function of the DOM API, but we will touch on some that are very useful. If you want to learn more about DOM API, the best place to start is the Mozilla Development Network: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM.

Selecting elements

Everything starts with the document object, and it contains nested elements. To select an element, we either traverse the entire document or use the DOM selectors. There are different methods to reference a document element, which can be done by element ID, class, name, tag, or XPath.

getElementById

This retrieves the element using a unique ID

getElementByClassName

This selects the element using the element class name

getElementByName

This provides a reference using the element name

getElementByTagName...