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

Anticipating the page loading error

Since we will soon be dealing with page loading, we should have some capabilities to identify whether or not the page is properly loaded. We can do this by checking the status of the loading of the page using the webpage object's open callback.

var system = require('system');
var url = system.args[1];
var page = require('webpage').create();
page.open(url, function(status) {
  if(status == 'success') {
    console.log('Page loaded.');
    // do more stuff here on the loaded page
  } else {
    console.log('Ooops! Problem loading page: ' this.url);
    phantom.exit(1);
  }
});

The open method's second parameter is a callback that will be executed after the page loads, with or without an error. The function callback will have a single parameter that will hold the status of the page loading operation. The object is in the string format.

The parameter will have the value 'success' if the page...