Show HN: Panther – A browser testing and web crawling library for PHP | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Panther – A browser testing and web crawling library for PHP

github.com

83 pointsxx_9_y10 comments

Great example of a modern PHP codebase!

From what I can tell the Symfony guys have always been at the forefront of PHP development. Many Composer dependencies I use seem to depend themselves on Symfony libraries.

Even though I'm not a massive PHP fan I can appreciate the hard work they're doing to make it a more viable and approachable language.

I recently did a deep dive into phpBB 3.2, which was modernized and was refactored to use some Symfony components. There's still a fair bit of cruft from the amazingly long history of the board, but I was impressed at some of the modern PHP, especially the s9e TextFormatter library.

I gotta say, the top thing on my complaints for PHP is rapidly becoming primarily the execution model.

By execution model I imagine you mean the whole single-request single-response thing? To which I can point you to something like https://reactphp.org/ and https://github.com/php-pm/php-pm, which are great projects that enable a different execution model for PHP.

Lets not forget swoole as well.

The execution model isn't the worst but, yeah, it could be better by enabling better inter-request persistence for, ie, databases (which is rather annoying if not supported out of the box)

On the other hand, it seems to be good enough for even a couple million hits per day.

Agreed. I think that community taught me a lot more than I can even recall about writing good code collaboratively.

Drupal 8 adopted Symfony's db layer because it was better than what they had been using

Dusk, anyone? https://laravel.com/docs/5.6/dusk

That's quite an interesting project. Might use that for an archiving service if it's powerful enough (I found that a lot of libs for interacting with browsers lack a proper API to dump the HTML of the current DOM, which would remove the requirement to even run Javascript once the page has loaded without loosing page content).

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