I have started this blog to keep track of all the interesting stuff I read about. In some cases, friends of mine have shared their cool stuff with me. I try to keep the headlines and descriptions short, so you must follow the links to read and decide for yourself if a topic is worth your time. Want to contribute? Just comment on any of the stories and I will be notified instantly.
If you're reading this article, you most likely know what a browser is. Now take away the GUI, and you have what's called a headless browser. Headless browsers can do all of the same things that normal browsers do, but faster. They're great for automating and testing web pages programmatically. There are a number of headless browsers in existence, and PhantomJS is the best.
In other words, the server can now act as the web user. The server-side can interact with any website from the point of view of a site visitor. The server can submit data, click links, wait for results, and process the results. Very powerful stuff indeed. This is a step beyond web scraping.
Here is an excellent example of what you can do with a headless browser: UpstreamCommerce.com crawls your competitors' websites to compare your pricings to theirs. They may be using some other technology, but certainly using a headless browser would be one way to do it.
Here is an excellent example of what you can do with a headless browser: UpstreamCommerce.com crawls your competitors' websites to compare your pricings to theirs. They may be using some other technology, but certainly using a headless browser would be one way to do it.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment