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Comment by hinathan | Hacker News Reader

This is really slick. It's tempting to think of this as a potential route towards headless functional testing — probably no substitute for something as heavy as selenium but for light tasks and DOM-based inspection of returned payloads (and screenshots, baked in!) it seems like a plausible foundation.

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Also note these other headless javascript testing frameworks:

Zombie.js: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2038663

HTMLUnit: http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net/

Celerity (JRuby wrapper around HTMLUnit): http://celerity.rubyforge.org/

I think the main differentiating factor between phantomjs and the above mentioned ones is that phantomjs actually uses WebKit and has full support for everything that WebKit supports. Zombie.js uses the DOM API due to jsdom, which might have its own parsing intricacies.

HTMLUnit has its own share of parsing gotchas.

I've used Selenium with Firefox and Xvfb to do headless scraping in the past; looks like my toolkit just got simpler.

I don't know that any of those support SVG. If you want to render e.g. Raphael.JS drawings on the server, headless JS with SVG DOM support is pretty useful.

That actually sounds like a really neat idea - throwing together a PhantomJS script that scrapes the content of a particular div containing Raphael or Flot and then renders as png.

Yeah, we're doing it with wkhtmltoimage right now, which works but makes me cringe every time I think about it.

I think the main difference for me between this and Selenium would be that Selenium offers some macros to click an element, or simulate a drag and drop between two elements. If you added those in here--wouldn't be too much more, I don't think--you'd have a competitive testing framework, albeit Webkit-only.

Assuming you could get jQuery to run inside this it should be pretty straight forward to translate the Selenium IDE's Selenese commands into jQuery statements.

I'm going to have to give this a run tomorrow in the AM.

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