vaviloff

Nice read indeed, also see previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26405515

Wow, so much praise for Kodi, and it's well-deserved.

Been using LibreELEC (which is basically a Kodi OS) on just a RPi3 for a few years now, it's a good enough client for non-smart TV to simply browse stuff from NAS with Yatse on Android. In a bare minimum case not too difficult to set up, just add a source via SFTP and you're done, no need for scanning.

This looks really nice! Is it possible to export data in an API way, for example to have an endpoint providing data in json format?

Also PhantomJS was a single statically linked binary with no dependencies that you could literally drop into a server and run scripts at once.

It's evidently for local work, /etc/hosts file is included in the repo.

This is great, starred! I like how you went beyond the usual "render page to png/pdf with CDP" stuff and made evaluate/exists/set screen size methods - one can see it's made for real use.

This could become a cool replacement for PhantomJS that people would actually use! I answer questions about PhantomJS on SO now and then - there are lots of questions on how to login to a site and download something while in a session, so - here's another idea for real world use: download to local fs method.

Other features people use often:

  * waiting for (an element/set amount of time), 
  * event for when a page has (re)loaded, to check if login/submit was successful
  * aborting select network requests - useful for scraping/testing

Very interesting comparison! Could you write a note on your experience somewhere?

Yes. After Google Reader's demise decided to invest some time and find a good self-hosted solution. Very pleased with Tiny Tiny RSS since then: https://tt-rss.org

It's free, has simple design, consumes few VPS resources, supports plugins. There apps for Android, iOS, WP. Requirements: a webserver, PHP, Mysql/Postgres.

or run it through Node-Webkit/nw.io

That's quite interesting! I thought node-webkit isn't suitable (yet) for such purpose. Could you go into more detail on how to do parsing/automation external sites with it?

CasperJS is a higher-level wrapper for PhantomJS, so - yes, it could be done with PhantomJS solely... But you wouldn't want to, because CasperJS makes automation easier.