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

Chapter 1. Getting Started

PhantomJS is a new solution that provides headless testing of web applications. It is also a tool for dynamically capturing and rendering pages as images. It allows you to programmatically manipulate page content to control and change it to different forms. It can scrape websites and save important information to files. It will also provide you network-level information of your page and site resources. These are just a few of the functions that PhantomJS can do for us. It provides a fresh and a whole new way for web designers, testers, and developers to perform and create browser-based solutions.

PhantomJS uses QtWebKit as its core browser capability and uses the WebKit JavaScript engine for script interpretation and execution. Anything and everything that you can do in a WebKit-based browser (such as Chrome, Safari, and Opera browser) you can do with PhantomJS. It's more than just a browser because it supports web standards, such as CSS selector, DOM manipulation, JSON, HTML5 Canvas, and SVG; moreover, you can do some cool stuff such as performing file system I/O, accessing system environment variables, or even instantiating your own implementation of a web server daemon.