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Comment by kmike84 | Hacker News Reader

A shameless plug: https://github.com/scrapinghub/splash is an open source tool similar to Phantom JS, and it has an interactive web editor built-in.

The concurrency model in Splash scripts is not the same as in Phantom JS scripts: Splash allows to use loops/ifs/functions in async code without recursion tricks or things like "casper.thenOpen". See http://splash.readthedocs.org/en/latest/scripting-tutorial.h... for more info.

We haven't done a public announcement, and Splash is not yet feature complete, but it is used in production for more than a year, there are hundreds of unit tests and it is in active (though a bit sporadic) development - so give it a try if you want something different :)

Installation is just "docker pull scrapinghub/splash" - see http://splash.readthedocs.org/en/latest/install.html.

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Looks nice! I created a service called Ghost Inspector last spring that runs PhantomJS under the hood: https://ghostinspector.com/

It's not open source, but there's a free tier and lots of nice features built in like video recording, screenshot comparison and a GUI editor.

If anyone is planning to write PhantomJS scripts directly, I strongly recommend checking out CasperJS: http://casperjs.org/ -- It gives you a really nice layer on top that makes Phantom much more wieldy.

There's also Automately (http://automate.ly/) it's a pretty interesting platform and it also allows for use of browser automation but differently than PhantomJS it's a little confusing to get setup at first but once you're there it's easy from there on.

It doesn't look like Automately is open source, but their API looks nice (based on examples from http://blog.automate.ly/).

We will actually be open sourcing our core very soon! We will also be including the source code for our SDK and Automately Pi (unreleased Raspberry Pi integration).

interesting but seems like just a selenium in the cloud. wouldn't it make more sense for someone to host automation scripts on their own servers?

It's actually more than that, our API doesn't only provide access to the Browser module. We provide an SDK that can help people build real-time applications that can connect with almost anything. We're getting ready to release our Raspberry Pi integration. We are also going to be going open source fairly soon.

how does the real time application benefit from automately?

We've basically created a connected platform that makes it very easy to connect things. You can have your web application talk to your server-side automately scripts. We've made it as simple as including some JavaScript on your web page. Our server-side APIs make it very easy to communicate with APIs and WebSites. Your Automately scripts can store data via the DataBus and they can talk to other execution jobs via the MessageBus.

Edit: Here's a very simple example http://searchproxy.automate.ly/

interesting idea! however, I am struggling to see when and how someone could use this, because almost always a developer such as myself would simply create an endpoint for something like this directly on the server.

It would be interesting to see what type of customers or use cases your solution might be of use.

I am not fully sure what you mean but if you mean running the automately stack on your own servers then you would be interested in automately-core our open-source core. Shoot us an email at open@automate.ly.

Cool. Haven't heard about it.

Will have a look. PhantomJS development seems stagnate a bit. Try to contribute to it myself.

I was under impression PhantomJS 2.x is rather active, but of course Splash contributions are welcome, that'd be great!

Splash Web UI is quite similar to PhantomJS Pad UI - by default it shows a CodeMirror text editor (with a simple autocompletion) and a screenshot of the webpage. Also, by default it shows information about requests/responses (like a "Network" tab in Firefox/Chrome development console) and a textarea with rendered html.

PhantomJS Pad UI ideas are good; tabs for images, an editor window which is open by default and a field with console logs make a lot of sense.

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