My current stake in PhantomJS

  • conference • webdriver • phantomjs • selenium • repl • london • opensource • ghostdriver
  • 395 words

I have been spending a lot of time on PhantomJS in the last couple of months. But feels like I could have done much more: there are so many interesting issues to work on in the official tracker.

** Hey, why don’t you give us a hand? :) **

My stake Some English expressions still puzzle me...

Here is where my stake is.

REPL

I just finished putting down a new wiki page that explains a bit about the REPL and how it works. Give it a read and let me know if you want more clarification.

I can already see few problems with it, as it doesn’t always behave as I want. I’m sure this is the beginning of the work on this feature, not the end. But it is a good start.

GhostDriver

Issue #49 - “Integrate with WebDriver” was opened in February 29 2011! Yes, more than 1 year ago.

So, last week I started hacking away on a new idea: now that PhantomJS has the webserver moduel (i.e. require("webserver").create()), it is possible to implement the full WebDriver Wire Protocol and have PhantomJS act as a back-end for RemoteWebDriver.

That’s when GhostDriver was born.

The code is very young, and the list of TODO is as long as the amount of code written, but you can already:

  • Start the RemoteWebDriver Server
  • Run the “Getting Started” example

if you already have PhantomJS on your system and you have Maven to build the example.

Speed-wise, there is no comparison: respect to use FirefoxDriver, the test takes between a 1/5 and a 1/10 of the time. When you launch GhostDriver on the side and than make the test hit it, it’s when you get the maximum performances.

Give it a go and let me know if the instructions provided are clear enough.

Selenium Conference 2012, London, UK

I managed to get a talk accepted for the Selenium Conference 2012, that this year will be hosted in London at the “IET London: Savoy Place” (tickets here / venue).

Selenium Conference 2012 - I'm Speaking Yes, I'm :)

The title of my talk couldn’t be more ostentatious:

"Speed Up Your Selenium Tests with PhantomJS, The Headless Browser" Ivan De Marino / Senior Software Engineer at Neustar Webmetrics

like I have any idea of what I’m talking about.

Anyway, if you come along and say hi, I’ll be pleased. Hopefully I won’t bore anyone to death.