Support for running phantomas in SlimerJS

[macbre]

PhantomJS 2.0 release is past due by about 1 month and there are quite a lot of bugs still open.

Consider porting phantomas to SlimerJS:

• it has the latest JavaScript engine
• supports all HTML5 standards (including Audio, Video and WebGL)
• support for Flash
• they claim to have API 98% compatible with PhantomJS
• onResourceReceived passes the body of the response (yay!)

Disadvantages:

• SlimerJS is not headless, but xvfb can be used on *nix boxes where xorg is not installed

@stefanjudis, @william-p, @cvan, @gomezd - let's discuss it :)

[macbre]

NPM package

[gomezd]

Could it be possible to abstract phantomas core so it runs on both? That opens more possibilities for testing in webkit and gecko browsers, similar to what casperjs is doing.

[william-p]

👍

[macbre]

@gomezd, as far as skimmed through SlimerJS documentation, that's possible and definitely worth it.

Will command line options like the following be enough?

--engine [gecko|webkit]

alternatively:

--gecko
--webkit

[stefanjudis]

Including both sounds great! 👍

[macbre]

Guys, thanks for your feedback. Issue title updated accordingly :)

[cvan]

For an old side project of mine, I've gotten SlimerJS working with xvfb on my local machine and a VPS. However, I did have issues using it on Stackato (ActiveState's PAAS like herkou) where the requested frame buffer memory size caused SlimerJS to crash on graphic-intensive web sites.

https://github.com/cvan/firesnaggle/blob/master/install-packages.sh
https://github.com/cvan/firesnaggle/blob/master/test-packages.sh

I think we should totally do this, but we should do thorough testing on pages of varying sizes.

[macbre]

@cvan, thanks for the feedback! It will definitely require lots of testing.

[macbre]

SlimerJS playground

[macbre]

Blockers:

• Please support require("system").stdin
• slimer.exit() should be able to set exit status
• provide paths to CommonJS modules installed via npm (require.paths)
• the lack of system.stderr slimerjs/#189
• init event triggered twice

TODOs:

• run via xvfb

[macbre]

SlimerJS support (run via xvfb) added to phantomas as an experimental feature. Core functionality works correctly, expect some glitches in various modules :)