Three years ago, the first version of PhantomJS was announced to the public. It is still a toddler, but hey, it is growing up and getting some traction at an unprecedented rate.
Looking at the number of downloads over the last few years, the trend is obviously “up to the right”, a total of over 3 millions downloads. This can be explained easily. Many web applications and projects are using a various different test frameworks, most of them rely on PhantomJS to run the tests headlessly. Thus, those crazy downloads are mostly automatic as PhantomJS is being pulled as one of the dependencies, typically in a CI system.
The community also keeps growing. Our mailing-list grows from just over a thousand members to 1,600 members. The code repository github.com/ariya/phantomjs doubles its stargazers to more than 9,100 to date. There are countless new projects using PhantomJS directly or indirectly, it is harder and harder to keep track of them all.
Just like any other toddlers of its age, PhantomJS is not perfect. It screams and makes a lot of noises. It does things you don’t expect it to do. And yet it keeps walking, running around, playing with friends, and brings a lot of happiness to those around it.
It gives us an ideal to strive towards. In time, it will help us accomplish wonders.
Here is to another amazing year!