Very nice! I've been using PhantomJS 2.0 for a while now at my automated browser testing startup: https://ghostinspector.com/ (It's been available to build from source for a couple months.)
It has a few lingering bugs (for instance, some issues with file uploads), but overall, it's a nice improvement over 1.9.x. The JavaScript engine is much newer and the rendering is improved.
Happy to see this! We use PhantomJS in our CLI tool Pageres, but the fact that the bundled WebKit engine in PhantomJS 1.x is ancient has caused a lot of headake for us and our users.
Excellent! I have used PhantomJS for web scraping but as that is always a gray area of legality. I'd love to hear any other major uses you've seen it used for. I always love it when I find that a tool I'm using can be used for other purposes.
I use it to print out HTML presentations. I did found some very annoying bugs in saving to PDF (I'll have to see if they have got fixed!), but this is the only (scriptable) way I know of saving each slide of a HTML presentation to PDF (which you need sometimes)
I used PhantomJS to drive a system integration with a hostile legacy web application.
By hostile I mean that the legacy system had no API, was implemented using obfuscated code, and resisted being driven by URLs.
We needed to integrate with it to create documents, calendar appointments, etc. in the legacy system, based on stuff that was happening in the newer system we were building.
We ended up using PhantomJS to implement a module that drove the legacy system via its HTML user interface -- pushing buttons, selecting meeting participants from the HTML select tags, submitting forms, etc.
Although that sounds (and is!) hacky as hell, it worked flawlessly 100% of the time. PhantomJS was a gift from the gods.
Primarily scraping of comet/ajax updating sites of course, but also some interesting uses for testing - crawling a site taking screenshots and then comparing screenshots across releases looking for layout bugs was quite a fun thing. The same principle as https://github.com/BBC-News/wraith
I once wanted to do automated testing with it. But because PhantomJS used an old webkit version, I couldn't :(
But that's one use case where I would love to use phantomJS or any other headless engine to test the frontend. I'm aware that for headless testing to work, there should be a headless browser of every major vendor. Maybe it's an utopia.
I use it to let my linux-based custom digital picture frame automatically pull photos from my IOS photostream. This is insecure because it requires that my photos are temporarily public, but it gets the job done.
Baking SVGs into PNGs for attaching to e-mails. We used D3 to generate SVG charts for displaying analytics data in-browser and then use Phantom to generate PNG versions. Works well.
The current release has no (very very limited?) flexbox support, making PhantomJS less and less useful for working with modern layouts. I'm very excited about this release.
Same here! It's saved us a tremendous amount of time for screenshots, especially when dealing with different sized viewports. Happy to see CSS3 is supported in 2.0 :)
untog|11 years ago
We use PhantomJS as a headless browser, sometimes taking screenshots. I know, crazy. Anyway: http://www.mystartup.com
seanp2k2|11 years ago
jwklemm|11 years ago
It has a few lingering bugs (for instance, some issues with file uploads), but overall, it's a nice improvement over 1.9.x. The JavaScript engine is much newer and the rendering is improved.
edwinnathaniel|11 years ago
We, AppNeta, use PhantomJS to perform Synthetic web-app monitoring
http://www.appneta.com/products/appview/
While PhantomJS has some limitation here and there, it is the _only_ headless browser our there AFAIK.
Disclaimer: I work for AppNeta (specifically for the AppView product).
mofle|11 years ago
https://github.com/sindresorhus/pageres
josephmecham|11 years ago
CJefferson|11 years ago
veidr|11 years ago
By hostile I mean that the legacy system had no API, was implemented using obfuscated code, and resisted being driven by URLs.
We needed to integrate with it to create documents, calendar appointments, etc. in the legacy system, based on stuff that was happening in the newer system we were building.
We ended up using PhantomJS to implement a module that drove the legacy system via its HTML user interface -- pushing buttons, selecting meeting participants from the HTML select tags, submitting forms, etc.
Although that sounds (and is!) hacky as hell, it worked flawlessly 100% of the time. PhantomJS was a gift from the gods.
weego|11 years ago
pothibo|11 years ago
But that's one use case where I would love to use phantomJS or any other headless engine to test the frontend. I'm aware that for headless testing to work, there should be a headless browser of every major vendor. Maybe it's an utopia.
greensoap|11 years ago
hedgehog|11 years ago
yeldarb|11 years ago
freshyill|11 years ago
Ronsenshi|11 years ago
kyledrake|11 years ago
chedigitz|11 years ago
A big thanks to PhantomJS devs!