Ask HN: PhantomJS or Protractor?

2 points by alistproducer2 9y ago ↗ HN

I'm building a framework that can be used to automate financial tasks like transferring money, paying bills, recurring donation, and alerting of irregularities. Think Mint or Check except it runs on your own machine and where a community of devs can add integrations with sites that don't provide API's.

Anyways, for debugging convenience I'm using Protractor but ultimately I don't know how feasible Protractor will be when it comes time to dockerize the server stack on a minimal linux distro.

The PhontomJS binary is going to be easier to manage in the long run, but while I'm working out the kinks I want the comfort of a headed browser.

What should I do?

1 comment

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oregondan 9y ago ↗

I just discovered that PhantomJS has a built-in web server that serves generic WebKit-based dev tools (basically identical to Chrome's)[0].

It's obviously not helpful in terms of seeing the layout of the site, but it's a helluva lot better than writing Phantom scripts, running it, seeing it's failed for some non-obvious reason, modifying it, running it again, having it fail, etc. If anyone has any other suggestions for avoiding pure trial/error workflows with Phantom, I'd love to hear it.

[0] http://phantomjs.org/troubleshooting.html#remote-debugging