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

Using third-party JavaScript libraries

JavaScript libraries are widely available and can make our coding much easier rather than starting from nothing. PhantomJS supports standard JavaScript, and making use of these libraries is supported. There are two ways to inject external JavaScript into PhantomJS: by using either the phantom object or the webpage module.

When external JavaScript is loaded within the phantom object, we can access the external script within our script globally. When JavaScript is injected within the webpage object, we can use these libraries with the page document to manipulate or extract data from the loaded page. Regardless of the loading method, the use of these scripts is dependent on how well they are coded and their purpose. For example, injecting jQuery is very useful for manipulating DOM elements.

var page = require('webpage').create();
page.open("https://github.com/", function(status) {
  if ( status === "success" ) {
    page.render...