Photo by Frank Wouters CC-BY via Wikimedia Commons.
Summer is gone. During the equinox, I have tagged version of 1.7.0 of PhantomJS, the headless WebKit for page automation. The code name for this one is Blazing Star with the following back story:
“Blazing Star” is a mesmerizing and beautiful flower, it is often used as a symbol representing happiness and satisfaction. Tending these flowers requires some patience, the reward is however worth all the hassle. Its beautiful appearance makes it popular among gardeners, don’t be surprised if you are stunned by the florets for hours and hours. Blazing star is also known to have mild medicinal characteristics. A fabulous combination of outer beauty and inner beauty I would say. These days, with almost every web-related test framework gets connected to PhantomJS in one way or another, presenting these attractive yet romantic blossoms marking a joyful relationship could not be a better honor for us.
Regular, predictable releases of PhantomJS have been something people always like, judging from the feedback. Blazing Star is another update which adds some incremental improvements such as better cookies handling, support for keyboard events, and module system. For a quick overview of all the new stuff, refer to the release notes.
On the infrastructure side, our homework is only partially done. For the timeline of this release, I managed to move “static” information (installation, release notes, FAQ, …) straight to the website (via GitHub pages). Meanwhile, Wiki pages are now hosted at GitHub since everyone seems to like it that way. It is not searchable, I just trust that Google crawlers will boost the discoverability. This kind of transition always takes time, e.g. API documentation is still being worked on. Don’t be surprised if there are missing bits and pieces in random places. We also take advantage of a new GitHub feature: contributing hook, a smooth way to remind everyone about the house rules.
The trend so far shows that PhantomJS user base keeps increasing. Comparing the total downloads in the 1.5 (Ghost Flower) and 1.6 (Lavender) series, this chart is what we got:
That is a pretty healthy growth! More and more people discover PhantomJS and start using it. This is also because various web-related tools, such as Grunt and Yeoman, leverage its page automation feature. In fact, if you are using a JavaScript testing framework, there is a likely chance that a suitable PhantomJS-runner for your headless testing is available.
Last but not least, many many thanks to everyone who contributed to this Blazing Star release!