Javascript web automation alternatives
A very common reason is a wrong site baseUrl configuration. Leverage gulp and the flexibility of JavaScript to automate slow, repetitive workflows and compose them into efficient build pipelines. Using code over configuration, utilize all of JavaScript to create your gulpfile—where tasks can be written using your own code or chained single purpose plugins. Write individual, focused tasks and compose them into larger operations, providing you with speed and accuracy while reducing repetition.
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Intelligent Test Automation
In the last few months, I've been trying to compare the languages that I've worked with so far. The reason being, I often find myself in situations when I have a task at hand, and I realize there are multiple different ways to do it in multiple languages, and I get analysis paralysis. Anyways, the focus of this post is Python, Javascript, and their use in Web automation. To be fair, both languages have different histories and evolved very differently, but web automation is one area that I feel where both languages have something to offer.
I'll try to compare Python and Javascript in the context of different usage patterns and ways of performing web automation.
I've seen a lot of beginners including the early-me misunderstanding the scope of web automation. I've got a couple of things to say here. If you automate any manual task on the web, the process of doing it can be called as web automation. Form filling, as the name suggests, means automating the manual interaction with forms on the web. This interaction could be entering text, selecting radio buttons, ticking checkboxes, etc.
Why would you want to automate them? Well, there could be many reasons. For instance, I once automated the login process of my university's library portal to make a CLI utility that would do things like subscription-renew, check fines, etc. Another reason could be that a large part of the time in your job is spent on filling in redundant details in these redundant forms, so you may want to automate these workflows.
Speaking of workflows,. This is my favorite use case for web automation. You can combine a bunch of automation pieces together to do things like,.
Testing is a very popular use-case of web automation. It is almost a necessity when you have a large web application. As a developer, you'd like to write test cases for functional behavior of the web feature that you're developing, so that you can be assured that it is working as per specifications. This is also called "Quality Assurance" or QA in the formal world.
And another thing that you'd like to have is to accumulate similar tests over the time in a test suite, so that every time you add a new feature, you are assured that its addition doesn't change any existing "expected" behavior in the bigger scheme of things.
Loosely speaking, this process is known as regression testing, and if you simulate it for the entire user journey, you can call it end-to-end testing. Automation testing for a website attempts to prevent many embarrassing bugs like "button not getting clicked," "broken URLs" unless you want to show off your creative pages , etc. Web scraping, in simple terms, is the act of extracting data from websites.
The data can be used for several purposes. It's often a cat and mouse game between the website owner and the developer operating in a legal gray area. There are different reasons that you might need to extract and organize data from other websites like doing some analysis or using it as an input for some business logic ex. The crux of web-automation is that instead of humans, you figure out some way to let the computers do those repetitive and tedious tasks.
Sidenote: Web automation even when assisted by AI is not equivalent to computers taking jobs; it's more like freeing humans to focus on more creative tasks like automating more things. Well, the programmers have relied on simulating the web in their programs to achieve what they want. Typical series of steps are making requests to the server, parsing the response, making sure if the response is as expected if testing is the purpose , otherwise taking actions based on the response, all via the program.
There are now high-level libraries and frameworks available to ease-off programmer's life while writing these automation scripts. For example, Selenium is quite a popular library for browser automation, supporting APIs for most of the popular languages.
For non-technology-focused enterprises, there are companies like import. Some companies also want to understand the consumer sentiment on social media or understand the consumer sentiments of the competitors, and there are services that let you set such kind of a monitoring system in a few clicks.
And for individuals who are not so code-friendly and probably want to do automation for different reasons , there are SaaS solutions that let one create workflows.
Some of the workflows don't interact directly with web per se, rather they depend on REST APIs, but the end objective is still the same, automation! And not to mention, there are a LOT of companies whose lifeline is just web automation consider product-and-price comparison services, or cross-browser testing solutions, for example. Okay, the important question now, "Given that I know either Python or Javascript, how do I go about doing web automation with them?
The motivation behind creating and using libraries is to minimize the boilerplate and not reinvent the wheel. Usually, the libraries that you'll use will provide with one or many of these functionalities,. For instance, requests is widely used for handling HTTP requests in Python, and the analogous library in Javascript is axios. Frameworks like scrapy take scraping to another level difference between a library and a framework.
The closer alternatives that I'm aware of for Javascript are node-crawler. Selenium Web Driver is a web automation framework. It can control the browser and thus can let you simulate user actions programmatically. Selenium is quite useful in the scenarios where the content that one wants to work on is either rendered at the browser side by libraries like Handlebars or React , or fetched by making future AJAX calls to the server and then rendered by the browser.
A couple of examples of this include:. These scenarios can only be handled if we are able to simulate browser like behavior hence Selenium to the rescue. Selenium has client interfaces for most of the popular languages including Python and Javascript, of course.
Usually, the triggering of the client program launches a browser instance, and we can see things like clicking and entering data on the screen, which is useful while testing. But if we care about just scraping, we can use "headless browsers" that don't have UI and are faster in terms of performance.
Chrome Headless is a popular choice for a headless web driver, and other options include Headless Firefox, and PhantomJS. You can download the latest versions of all of the Selenium components from here.
The javascript testing ecosystem has a lot of tools that overlap with web-automation. I'm avoiding discussing them here because it's a subject of an entire post, but you can check this nice post if you'd like to explore. There are some tools that you'll be using fairly often when you're doing web automation. Some of them are,.
Okay, now it's time to compare these two languages face-to-face. You can read more about the process here. I've used the respective popular libraries requests and axios in both the languages mentioned previously for handling HTTP requests. The implementations are not equivalent line-to-line, but the gist is the same. Here are a few things that I've to say about both these languages,. This is a preferred-paradigm difference that you'll see in the Python and Javascript libraries.
Javascript libraries lean towards the promise, and callback style programming, which means the code is more likely to be complex check callback hell , whereas Python libraries are synchronous.
Of course, it is possible to follow both the paradigms in both the languages. But you can already see in the snippets that it is easier to follow along with the Python code than the JavaScript code you can argue that JavaScript is not well written above, and that's the thing I want to stress on next.
I find it slightly more difficult to understand and implement Javascript constructs. I feel that the leniency in JavaScript demands great responsibility as a developer to get things done "rightly. Things like immutable object types, strict argument matching for functions, strong typing, can prevent bugs due to reasons like malformed input from creeping into your automation pipeline.
If you've worked with Javascript, you might be familiar with those annoying bugs due to things like "undefined" values, implicit typecasting, async related issues, etc. The difference in performance ultimately boils down to design or the underlying runtime and libraries. The V8 engine is a Just-in-time compiler and is natively non-blocking.
The popular libraries in the Javascript ecosystem have tried hard to take advantage of this design. Not to mention that V8 is maintained by Google hence a lot of resources being poured into optimizing it. Benchmarks can be subtle, so not including them in the post. But if you're interested in benchmarks, do check out Benchmark Game's comparison of node and Python.
A programming language has more to offer than just grammar and implementation. It has a community of developers, a mechanism to share and distribute code, a collection of reusable distributions, and much more. In this post, I tried to briefly touch on Python, JavaScript, and their differences in the context of Web automation. I hope that you got some useful information that might help you in picking a language among these two in future. Hey, I have gone through your complete post, thank you for sharing such whole concept of Python, Java and Web automation.
It was also great to know about Selenium and how it works. I have taken some online classes by Gayatri Mishra on this all above mentioned courses and specially on Selenium Testing, it was very helpful and the steps provided there was very easy and understandable.
While in your post I found something new and more steps to follow. Mobile App Development. Programming Languages. Get insights on scaling, management, and product development for founders and engineering managers. Read programming tutorials, share your knowledge, and become better developers together.
Hot Topics. Satwik Kansal Follow. Published Nov 22, What exactly is web automation? Firstly, Web scraping is one kind of web automation, but web automation is more generic than that. Secondly, If you automate any manual task on the web, the process of doing it can be called as web automation. Some web automation tasks There are many that you can think of, but here are some of the popular ones, Form filling Form filling, as the name suggests, means automating the manual interaction with forms on the web.
Speaking of workflows, Creating workflows This is my favorite use case for web automation. You can combine a bunch of automation pieces together to do things like, Periodically visit your favorite wallpaper site, see if there are any new wallpapers added, if yes, then download them and add it to your active wallpapers collection.
Selenium testing
Whenever a test engineer thinks of turning their manual effort of testing web applications into automated scripts, Selenium is the first tool that they would opt for. According to surveys, most Automation Test Engineers use Selenium in their projects. Choosing a perfect automation solution for any organization is a challenging task. Most of them seem to opt for open-source solutions. With TestCafe, you can write tests in JavaScript and TypeScript and is easy to use, free and has enhanced features, which helps the testers in overcoming the efforts of setting up plugins. Test Cafe is a Node. With its easy to install feature in a single command, you can write scripts in JavaScript [or] TypeScript.
A Guide to Automating & Scraping the Web with JavaScript (Chrome + Puppeteer + Node JS)
This item in japanese. Aug 30, 1 min read. Guy Nesher. ReScript is one of several emerging programming languages that helps web developers build complex web applications that can be transpiled into JavaScript and run in the browser. JavaScript usage has changed drastically over the past 25 years. However, while the language continues to evolve, it struggles to deliver the capabilities required for the complex applications that are being developed these days. Languages like ReScript and TypeScript fill in the gaps that exist in JavaScript and help developers build more robust applications that can still run in the browser through JavaScript transpilation. TypeScript quickly became the dominant player in the field by offering a convenient migration path from JavaScript that relies on the fact that TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, meaning that code written in JavaScript is a valid TypeScript code - making the migration process as easy as renaming a file.
The Good and the Bad of Selenium Test Automation Software
Use popular frameworks and tools right out-of-the-box. Focus on building features instead of configuring disparate components yourself. Developed for over a decade and trusted by industry giants. Meteor is a mature open source framework that allows you to build and scale efficiently so you can serve millions of users. Pathable's platform produces white label mobile apps and websites for conferences, trade shows and meetings of all types.
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Adding helper functions, or more complicated sets and combinations of existing commands is simple and really useful. The huge variety of community plugins allows you to easily integrate and extend your setup to fulfill your requirements. WebdriverIO allows you to automate any application written with modern web frameworks such as React , Angular , Polymer or Vue. It comes with smart selector strategies that can, e. The community around WebdriverIO is actively speaking on various user groups or conferences about specific topics around automated testing with WebdriverIO. The WebdriverIO testrunner comes with a command line interface that provides a nice configuration utility that helps you to create your config file in less than a minute.
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In one word: automation. The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it through a Gruntfile , a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort. The Grunt ecosystem is huge and it's growing every day. With literally hundreds of plugins to choose from, you can use Grunt to automate just about anything with a minimum of effort. If someone hasn't already built what you need, authoring and publishing your own Grunt plugin to npm is a breeze. See how to get started. Many of the tasks you need are already available as Grunt Plugins, and new plugins are published every day.
We would recommend CodeceptJS to anyone who is looking for a Javascript based testing framework. We were searching for a solution to write tests which are good to read and easy to write. It must be able to run on several browsers and understandable across different teams with different knowledge and different frameworks in usage. CodeceptJS helps us with all this and much more at Porsche and we are happy that we made that decision.
Please enter corrrect email id. Let's set up your account. You can self-host n8n, easily extend it, and even use it with internal tools. Check out open source alternatives to n8n below. Beehive is an open source event and agent system, which allows you to create your own agents that perform automated tasks triggered by events and filters. It is modular, flexible and really easy to extend for anyone.
Selenium is a suite of open-source tools mainly to test web applications. It works as an API for browser automation. Selenium testing is clearly the most prevalent approach for QA testing — giving the capacity to make custom test automation situations that outfit an assortment of browsers and languages. Advantages of Selenium:. Still, it misses the mark as users would need to employ skilled QA developers, which can be expensive. Applications have turned out to be progressively intricate in recent years, particularly with the utilization of prominent JavaScript structures, for example, Angular.
A test-automation framework is a set of best practices, common tools, and libraries that help quality-assurance testers assess the functionality, security, usability, and accessibility of multiple web and mobile applications. In a "quick-click" digital world, we're accustomed to fulfilling our needs in a jiffy. This is one reason why the software market is flooded with hundreds of test-automation frameworks. Although teams could build elaborate automated testing frameworks, there's usually little reason to spend the money, resources, and person-hours to do so when they can achieve equal or even better results with existing open source tools, libraries, and testing frameworks.
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