5 ms·

Well with Chrome going headless there isn't a whole lot of place for PhantomJS anyway. Or is there? What is it still good for?

• minitoar 9y ago
  Maintaining systems already built on top of PhantomJS.
  • toomuchtodo 9y ago
    A bit concerning, as youtube-dl relies on PhantomJS currently.
    • netheril96 9y ago
      youtube-dl will do fine. It is updated once in several days, and with that activity count, I think they will transition to headless chrome in no time.
      • bklaasen 9y ago
        Amazingly, youtube-dl works very reliably in Termux[1]. I can't see that surviving a transition to headless Chrome. [1] https://termux.com/ https://termux.com/
  • paulie_a 9y ago
    I am curious about this aspect and probably should do some research, but how will highcharts to PDF work? Phantomjs was generally great for that type of rendering
• epx 9y ago
  Not sure whether it is as easy to use as PhantomJS.
  • redka 9y ago
    Well that depends if you're stuck with Javascript. There isn't anything simpler (that I'm aware of - bu I do web scraping/automation professionally for about 6 years) than watir[0]. PhantomJS doesn't even come remotely close. [0] http://watir.com/ http://watir.com/
  • nkozyra 9y ago
    I'd say Puppeteer is on-par with Phantom for ease of basic use. It has a richer, deeper API, of course, but at its core it's modern Javascript.
    • chucksmash 9y ago
      +1 on Puppeteer. Using it for something now. For small projects, the ability to have the JS you want to run within the context of the page itself live side by side with your browser instrumentation code feels magical. Head and shoulders nicer experience than in cases where half of your logic is second class code-as-a-string (e.g. trying to work directly with Gremlin Server from a non-JVM language by POSTing Groovy-as-a-string)
      • epx 9y ago
        Thanks for the info.
      • vorg 9y ago
        > half of your logic is second class code-as-a-string (e.g. trying to work directly with Gremlin Server from a non-JVM language by POSTing Groovy-as-a-string It must be particularly difficult when your Groovy-as-a-string script itself has many strings in its code, which is what a typical Apache Groovy build script for Gradle looks like.
• apocalyptic0n3 9y ago
  Legacy systems for one. The Cooperative Patent Classification group releases their classifications en masse as HTML (single zip download, which is great). I built a parser for a PHP project that could parse all several hundred thousand records from the HTML in a few minutes. In 2017, they switched to a system that loads in the data from JSON stored in Javascript in the HTML (it is every bit as terrible as you imagine). Obviously loading in the HTML and trying to use regex to match the JSON was a terrible idea (especially since it was encoded to boot...), so I instead used Phantom to load each file, render it, and save it to a temporary file which I then parse using the original pre-2017 parser. Like 10 lines of code in Phantom to do it. Obviously with my situation, this is not the end of the world. I use the parser twice a year and Phantom will continue to handle that task just fine. But I also know that the switch to using headless Chrome would be an expensive one if necessary; we have to research it, we have to update local dev environments, we have to implement it, we have to write new tests for it, we have to test it, we have to updating our deployment strategy, update our server deployment configuration, and, worst of all, get all of these changes and new software installations approved by the USPTO which is a nightmare. My situation is simple, but would take several weeks to several months to actually deploy to production. As it stands, I will likely have to explain why we have a now-unmaintained piece of software on the server and may be forced to switch regardless. I can easily imagine how this project sunsetting, even though there is a clear alternative and successor, could be a nightmare to a lot of people. It's not the end of the world, but it's definitely unfortunate
  • redka 9y ago
    Why would you need PhantomJS for that? Can't you just parse the HTML files with Nokogiri and be done with it? That would be orders of magnitude faster anyway
    • apocalyptic0n3 9y ago
      I had to actually render the HTML and run the Javascript in order to populate the HTML with the data I needed to parse. The HTML does not include the parse-able data by default and is populated at runtime from JSON embedded in the Javascript in the HTML. As far as I am aware, Nokogiri isn't capable of that and even if it is, I was unaware of that library at the time I wrote the Phantom solution (only discovered it last Summer but have yet to use it for anything)