Rapid PhantomJS is for web developers who have some existing knowledge of javascript and are not afraid of using the command line.

About This Book

Learn to write fully functional scripts in under 80 minutes
Learn how to handle page rendering and automation
Harness the essentials of PhantomJS to run scripts in a headless browser with practical examples

Table of Contents

PHANTOMJS - INTRODUCTION
FRONTEND UNIT TESTING WITH PHANTOMJS
AUTOMATING YOUR WORKFLOW WITH INCLUDED TESTS BASED ON PHANTOMJS

What You Will Learn

Learn to write advanced PhantomJS scripts
Make use of the phantom object to deal with general PhantomJS functionality
Implement a system object to read out system arguments and make your scripts more generic and reusable
Monitor the network activity of any website using the webpage object
Automate visitor behavior on any website using the evaluate function
Execute a frontend unit test suite like Jasmine and retrieve the results
Adapt popular frontend build tools to automate your newly gained knowledge of PhantomJS easily

In Detail

PhantomJS enables developers to load, browse, and analyse web pages automatically by writing simple scripts. It's useful for testing web pages that work as expected, monitoring performance, extracting relevant content, simulating user behaviour, and producing automatic web page screen shots. PhantomJS saves developers from needing to visit large nuMbers of web pages just to check how they work.

Rapid PhantomJS will help you to write your own PhantomJS scripts easily in order to perform various testing tasks.

You will begin with a detailed description of the main functionality to build up the base of advanced PhantomJS scripting. You will then move on to learn about the scripting for the four main use cases of PhantomJS, which covers rendering images from any website to avoid visual regression, monitoring network traffic to notice performance degradation, simulating user behavior, and checking the results of your unit testing suite automatically. This is where you will master popular frontend build tools such as make, npm scripting, Grunt, and gulp. These will be set up to help you automate your new developed PhantomJS scripts in any environment.

By the end of the course, you will be able to automate and optimize your workflow with the help of PhantomJS, which leads to higher productivity and products of higher quality.

Style and Approach

Rapid PhantomJS is for web developers who have some existing knowledge of javascript and are not afraid of using the command line.

Authors

Stefan Judis

Stefan Judis lives in Berlin and has been developing websites using popular frontend technologies like Grunt, Gulp, Require.js, and Backbone.js for five years. He fell heavily in love with open source, automation, and tooling. He is the maintainer of two Grunt plugins that are based on PhantomJS, which help avoiding visual regression and making it easier to gain frontend-related performance metrics (grunt-photobox and grunt-phantomas). You can look him up on Github and Twitter.