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

Checking a location based on IP address

IP geolocation services are widely available now and accessing them gives us new ways to look for new items on the web, such as when we want to get a list of establishments that are close to us. If we can determine the location of a user, we can customize content that is more appropriate to their location.

There are several IP geolocation services that are available and free:

Web URL

Output format

freegeoip.net

CSV, XML, and JSON

ipinfodb.com

XML

hostip.info

HTML and XML

We will use freegeoip.net since it has output in JSON and JSON is much lighter than XML or other formats; aside from this, JSON is natively supported in JavaScript. We can directly parse and manipulate JSON objects readily, without using any third-party library.

Based on the freegeoip.net documentation, to get the geolocation, we must use the following URL format: http://freegeoip.net/(format)/(IP or hostname).

The (format) part of the URL can be one of the following: CSV...