CasperJS Presentation

It’s been a good 4 years since I last gave a public presentation in Memphis (it was on PowerShell), so I figured it was time to give another talk. Tonight, I gave a short talk on CasperJS at the Memphis Java User Group.

If you’re unfamiliar with CasperJS, I like to think of it as a really nice wrapper library around PhantomJS, which is a headless WebKit engine. If you know Chrome, you know WebKit… WebKit is just the open source backing project for Chrome. PhantomJS lets you drive Chrome in an automated way with JavaScript. CasperJS is a library to provide syntactic sugar around PhantomJS. It also provides methods to let you write integration tests for your web stack.

Just to give you a sample script, here is one that I demoed that verifies that my blog title is correct.

var casper = require('casper').create()

casper.start('http://mohundro.com', function () {
  this.test.assert(
    this.getCurrentUrl().indexOf('mohundro') !== -1,
    'the url should not redirect away'
  )
  this.test.assertTitle('David Mohundro', 'my blog has the title of my name')
})

casper.run(function () {
  this.test.renderResults(true)
})

A nicety with CasperJS is that it has native CoffeeScript support. The same script could be written like so:

casper = require('casper').create()

casper.start 'http://mohundro.com', () ->
  @test.assert @getCurrentUrl().indexOf('mohundro') != -1, 'the url should not redirect away'
  @test.assertTitle 'David Mohundro', 'my blog has the title of my name'

casper.run () ->
  @test.renderResults true

If you came out, I hope you enjoyed the talk. I’ve posted my slides and demos out on my presentations Github repository. Check it out.