CasperJS hits 1.0 stable

This post has been published more than 11 years ago, it may be obsolete by now.

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:

Where will all of this end? Capture courtesy of gitego.com

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:

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.