PhantomJS, Selenium, and Django: Headless Browser Testing for the Rest of Us

For Firefox support, there is SlimerJS, a PhantomJS alternative that is coming along very nicely for testing your websites on the Gecko rendering engine. It even supports WebGL. Try it as an alternative CasperJS engine:<p><a href="http://casperjs.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;casperjs.org&#x2F;</a>

Two questions from a none Python developer.<p>- If there are no Python bindings, could one invoke native bindings from with Python? - Is it normal to add a base class for utility rather than use a field level instance?<p>Yours, curiously.

We tried phantomjs for a while but it was very unstable (regularly crashed and since it&#x27;s open source, bug reports often go ignored, even with stack traces), undocumented behavior, and fairly unusual ecosystem. I believe phantom made a fundamental mistake of not being nodejs based in the first place. Phantom has some really nice features though, like being able to read the console output. Selenium is kind of a joke in terms of features, but at least it&#x27;s stable. I would choose selenium unless you get a specific benefit out of phantomjs.

Selenium is awesome. I&#x27;m using it in Java and PHP. I had a run in with it in its 1.x days and it was too unreliable to maintain the tests. Now it&#x27;s fantastic.

Easiest acceptance testing framework I&#x27;ve used is Splinter. It&#x27;s an abstraction layer over Selenium that practically makes writing tests similar to plain English: <a href="http://splinter.cobrateam.info/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;splinter.cobrateam.info&#x2F;</a>

PhantomJS is awesome for speed, but I noticed that it sometimes doesn&#x27;t render iframe elements, ajaxed elements properly while using just Firefox does render all elements correctly.