Phantomjs on Zio Ivan

PhantomJS 1.9.6 vs 1.9.7: what went wrong?

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

tl;dr; Latest stable release of PhantomJS is 1.9.7, and you should probably go and download it. It contains GhostDriver 1.1.0 “Banquo”, and that’s it.

1.9.6, released not more than 2 weeks ago (1 week?), was a coordination went wrong and I take part of the responsibility for it. Just discard that release.

What’s the long story?

So, for a few days I was helping with testing and refining the new cookiejar module (#11535) for PhantomJS that Joseph Rollinson (jtrollinson) contributed. I’m very interested in this module because it allows to instantiate multiple Cookie Jar objects instead of having all the WebPage object use the same jar. Such feature would allow GhostDriver to finally support Session Isolation (#170), a long overdue feature.

GhostDriver 1.1.0: codename "Banquo"

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

It’s long overdue. Last time I have cut a release of GhostDriver (1.0.4) was… July 2013. And blogged about it only in August!!! I gotta take a look at my GitHub commits over the 2013: something tells me that year-in-commits nicely overlaps with my eventful 2013. But let’s try to stay on topic.

So, GhostDriver 1.1.0, codename “Banquo”. This time the codename was picked by my wife - fitting, given how important she has become this year for Leonardo and Me.

RESETtling...

Sat, 30 Nov 2013 23:36:12 +0000

Puff, Pant! THAT was not easy! But finally, “normality” seems not too far away.

Many things have happened in the recent months: we got married; I helped my lovely wife with the pregnancy (well, she did all the hard work); and, on the 7th of November, we have became parents of this beauty:

Leonardo Antonio DE MARINO-SIMOLA

Now, we have to slowly learn to live our new life together: while we learn how to be parents, Leonardo will be learning how to be a baby. What now looks like a difficult, consuming and intense task (ask me how much we sleep at night!), will at some point become “daily routine”. A sweeter routine with Leo at the center of it all!

GhostDriver 1.0.4, blog migration and blogging too little

Fri, 09 Aug 2013 16:03:47 +0000

Yes, I’m not blogging enough. Yes, it’s a shame that the world can’t read my terrible English on a more regular basis. Yes, I’m lazy.

Well, here is a quick update for the few eager souls I have let down.

GhostDriver

I have release GhostDriver 1.0.4 - “Arghan Div”. It should be released in the upcoming PhantomJS 1.9.2.

The code has been merged already into PhantomJS master branch so, if you are really keen on putting your hands on it, just do a ./build.sh of that branch.

I'm off. See you in 2 weeks.

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:53:06 +0000

This message is for the few souls that care. This is for the few people that maybe are waiting for me to fix/implement stuff on GhostDriver or PhantomJS (for the latter you have coverage, as the team on that is rich of geniuses - so you won’t miss my average-hood).

I’m getting married (crazy, right?) and will be mostly off-line. I should be back from the second week of April.

Surely there will be the usual casual-tweet but nothing major.

GhostDriver 1.0.3 is out!

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

After few months of endless nights trying to figure out what I screwed up and where, I’m finally happy (enough) to release GhostDriver 1.0.3 into the wild.

This release is an hardening release: this means that it’s focused on bug-fixing and very little new features have been added.

GhostDriver 1.0.3 ~~will be part of the upcoming PhantomJS 1.9 release, do in few days~~ is now part of PhantomJS 1.9.0, and you can download binaries for various platform from https://code.google.com/p/phantomjs/downloads/list.

Me @ Selenium Camp 2013

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Selenium Camp 2013 has been a great experience. Not only I hanged out with great people, but, for the first time in my life, I also got to savour a little bit of Ukraine in Kiev.

VERY friendly people (really friendly). GREAT food. WELL-ORGANISED conference.

What else could I ask for?

My talk

The title of my talk is Getting Started with GhostDriver (and my experience working on it!).

UPDATE: here is the video:

Console++ - enhance your console

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 01:05:48 +0000

I need a logger for GhostDriver but I’m too lazy to figure out how to use a nice, proper logging library. Plus I’m a BIG fun of old-school-debugging: I just substituted all the printf() calls with console.log.

So I decide to make every JavaScript developer shiver in disgust and wrote a small library that enhances the global console object.

This tiny library is called Console++ and works with NodeJS, PhantomJS and any decent JavaScript runtime.

Finally, GhostDriver 1.0.0

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

After ~10 months of work, I finally managed to push the ball forward enough to reach GhostDriver 1.0.0. I won’t lie: it does feel great. It always is to see so much effort mutate into an achievement, even it is such only for me.

Before I go any further though, I owe a massive THANK-YOU to the people that through contribution and / or issue reporting have helped me to build a releasable 1.0.0. In particular to Jim Evans, an awesome guy and a bit of a mentor for me: you ROCK Jim, and I think that is true, literally!

GhostDriver, 90% and priorities

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Last few weeks have been HECTIC to say the least. Work on GhostDriver and related PhantomJS improvements has been very intense.

We just shipped PhantomJS 1.7, and work for 1.8 is already started (check out the ghostdriver-dev branch I linked above).

GhostDriver has reached almost 90% completion for 1.0, and the code is being hardened, thanks also to the amazing work that Jim Evans is doing at spotting issues and, a lot of times, providing fixes. GhostDriver is getting better and better thanks to you Jim.

Look mummy, I'm 80% done!

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Let me give you a quick update about GhostDriver, the PhantomJS WebDriver implementation.

Yes, it’s 80% ready for prime time (bugs aside)!!!

How did I get from 40% to 80% so quickly? Because I decided that, for version 1.0, the commands that relate to the mobile web driver are out of scope. 1.1 or 1.2 will have them.

For details, I suggest you check out the spreadsheet I’m using to track progress closely.

GhostDriver: a quick update

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 08:33:17 +0000

For whom might concern.

Development of GhostDriver has been “slowed down” in the past 2/3 weeks for unforeseen heavy work schedule.

The project is not dead AT ALL. Actually, important work has been done: I have implemented support for window.open() handling into the current PhantomJS master.

This new feature in PhantomJS is KEY to unlock a whole set of functionalities that before we couldn’t implement in GhostDriver. So, while WebDriver Wire Protocol Commands were not added, a key blocker has been removed.

GhostDriver: almost 50%

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 07:53:18 +0000

This post is long overdue. It’s weeks that I HAVE TO write it and yet couldn’t find the time to put it together. Oh well, better late than…

Since my talk about GhostDriver at the Selenium Conference 2012 I have received lots of interest from the community about GhostDriver: finally a WebDriver for PhantomJS.

If you haven’t followed me so far, a quick catch up: I’m working to implement the WebDriver WireProtocol on the top of PhantomJS, so to leverage our favorite headless browser. The project is proceeding, even though not as fast as I would have liked: you can find details about the current status in the “official” README.md and/or checking out the “Implemented Commands” spreadsheet.

Me @ the Selenium Conference 2012

Tue, 01 May 2012 14:56:36 +0000

It’s widely spread opinion that at some point of our career we, software people, should start giving speeches and talks. I’m firmly convinced that THAT is not for me, and I want to carve my ears out of my head every time I hear my heavily-accented-english, mixed with my ability to cut words and make the message come across barely understandable.

But, this presentation was really important to me: I presented my-work-so-far on building a PhantomJS WebDriver. I call it GhostDriver (provisional name).

My current stake in PhantomJS

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

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? :) **

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.

PhantomJS REPL: it's ready for a taste

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 02:00:52 +0000

After 2 months of on-off working on this, I finally managed to make something I’m happy with: a REPL for PhantomJS.

The last post I wrote about this was in November 2011 (!!!). But I started putting code together only in Jan 2012. So, overall, from the first commit until today is almost 2 months.

First thing first: how do you get to try it? Well, you can get my fork, switch to the dev-repl branch and try it out:

Scope 'this', and scope 'that'

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As a guy that tries to live his professional life in the middle of the dichotomy “C/C++ - JavaScript”, I often find myself discussing the discrepancies, differences and implementation details of the latter (an half-assed prototypal language) using the former.

The other day I was chatting with Luca (@lucabox) about scope in JS, and we were describing the different situations you can end up with… and how we work our way out of those culprits.

Crossing the pond

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:30:47 +0000

I borrowed the title from a guy who kickstarted all of this. Thanks Ariya ;)

I’m leaving Betfair. I owe a lot to this company: for a bit longer than a year I have had the pleasure to work with smart, enlightened, knowledgeable people from which I learned loads. Leaving was definitely not an easy choice.

The only thing didn’t happen, is that I didn’t become a proper punter: I just learned that even something sounding “boring” as betting on sports, can actually be a very big challenge in terms of the technologies involved. Even more, if you try to do it in the Betfair way: with million of customers, all constantly hammering the servers to make the most out of their money.

REPL and HTTP Mapping: ideas to contribute to PhantomJS

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:11:47 +0000

Recently, I’m donating my spare time to the amazing Stanford Online AI Class, and writing down notes takes time.

But I’m still working, in the spare time of the spare time, on PhantomJS. Yes, very slowly, but I’m not stall.

Recently two ideas have come to mind, and it’s stuff I’d love to see supported by PhantomJS.

REPL

From the Wikipedia article:

A read–eval–print loop (REPL), also known as an interactive toplevel, is a simple, interactive computer programming environment. […] In a REPL, the user may enter expressions, which are then evaluated, and the results displayed.

Maven, PhantomJS and Jasmine to write your JS Unit Testing

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

In Betfair we are building all sort of new things, and one of the aspects on which we are trying to focus more is doing Automated Tests for JavaScript. Currently, all non-js code in Betfair passes through different kind of Automated (and Human) Testing (from Unit Testing, to Security, to Performance, to Human and Scripted QA), but the JavaScript language, by its very nature, makes it tricky to test in an automated fashion. It’s not impossible, just a bit harder than it should.

Thinking out aloud: a JavaScript based console?

Thu, 05 May 2011 21:45:56 +0000

In the last month or two I started contributing to PhantomJS:

PhantomJS logo

PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG. PhantomJS is an optimal solution for headless testing of web-based applications, site scraping, pages capture, SVG renderer, PDF converter and many other use cases.

The project is really interesting and we are seeing a steady growth in terms of: