Automating the Web Using PhantomJS and CasperJS
Learn to use PhantomJS and CasperJS to automate your interaction with the web to perform numerous tasks such as data scraping, network monitoring, page rendering, and browser testing in a programmatic manner.
What you'll learn
When done manually, data scraping, monitoring, and testing are labor-intensive and time-consuming. This course, Automating the Web Using PhantomJS and CasperJS, teaches web developers various ways that PhantomJS (a "headless" scriptable web browser) and CasperJS (a utility wrapper around PhantomJS) can be utilized to automate these kinds of interactions with websites. First, you'll learn how to programmatically scrape target information from a webpage by creating a navigation script, allowing you to automatically gather the links that would be tested using your toolset. Next, you will implement a script to visit all the links that are gathered and capture screenshots from them, afterwards building a script that would monitor a page's network activity to check the state of the resources for catching potential failures. Finally, you will implement a testing suite to check the markup of a given web page against a few accessibility requirements. By the end of this course, you'll understand how to use PhantomJS and CasperJS to automate these tasks in order to save yourself time and effort.
Table of contents
About the author
Engin Arslan is a front end developer with a Bachelor of Science in Materials Engineering and a Postgraduate Degree in Visual Effects. Before becoming a front end developer, he worked as a visual effects artist / technical director on films and TV shows including Resident Evil, Tron, Mama, Pompeii, Vikings, and Strain. He received an Emmy nomination and won a Canadian Screen Award for his Visual Effects work on the TV show Vikings. During his time in VFX, he fell in love with Python and with pro... more