CasperJS hits 1.0 stable

Hey, long time no see, right? Quite a lots of things have happened to my tiny CasperJS pet project since then, which has just hit its 1.0 stable milestone. Merry Christmas :)

As a reminder, CasperJS is an open source navigation scripting & testing utility written in Javascript and based on PhantomJS — the scriptable headless WebKit engine.

Now some scary metrics about the project:

• the project has now more than 1000 stargazers and 150 forks on github
• more than 900 commits have been pushed to the master branch (430 just for the documentation one)
• 47 people have contributed patches and docs to the project; I hereby want to hug them all!
• 683 tests ensure the software is actually stable
• 387 members are subscribed to the mailing-list
• 88 questions have been posted on Stack Overflow about CasperJS
• 400 people are following the @casperjs_org twitter account

Btw here’s a short excerpt of what people are saying on twitter about it:

</brag><realism>

That makes a lot of attention — and therefore expectations — for what started as a tiny helper script on top of PhantomJS… and put a bit of pressure on my shoulders :)

So what’s new in CasperJS 1.0?

Lots of stuff, and I mean it. In no particular order:

• added a casperjs test command to run test scripts
• added support for CSS3 and XPath selectors
• added support for popups and (i)frames
• there’s now a way to specify how many tests were planned when done() is called
• easy access of current HTTP response object as the first parameter of step callbacks (thx oncletom!)
• many new assertions methods have been added to the Tester class
• added a convenient Batch script for Windows users that’s where you gotta love your community
• better contextualization of errors, nicer output of them
• XUnit XML test result logs now contain the duration of each test case
• added many new events and filters so you can hook quite wherever you want into the casper asynchronous workflow
• better compliance with PhantomJS’ native evaluate() argument passing
• plus many bugfixes, refactors and other enhancements

As a side note:

• PhantomJS 1.6.x support has been dropped
• PhantomJS 1.7 & 1.8 are supported

The CasperJS ecosystem

As I realized that opensource projects based on CasperJS were created, I decided to open a dedicated github organization, first for trying to list them in a central place.

Some interesting CasperJS-based projects:

• SpookyJS, which basically allow driving CasperJS from Node.js
• resurectio, a Chrome extension for recording your casper tests
• casper-chai extends Chai with assertions for CasperJS
• grunt-casperjs and grunt-functional, both based on grunt, allowing to launch your CasperJS tests as well as other javascript build operations in a single command line call
• PhantomCSS, which provides integration of js-imagediff with PhantomJS (and CasperJS) for automated visual regression testing
• yadda, which has just started but is genuinely exciting, intends to bring BDD to CasperJS
• … and many other cool & useful projects

The future

• CasperJS 1.1 is on its way starting today, and will provide new features and bugfixes, trying not to reinvent the casper wheel
• CasperJS 2.0 will probably be a big rewrite refactor of the 1.x codebase, and will try to use more of the existing javascript ecosystem (think mocha for instance)… but let’s enjoy the 1.x for a while first! and let me have a bit of sleep too

See ya.