Hosted PhantomJS Service

[Chad DeShon]

PhantomJS is great. I'm launching a "headless browser as a service," which I hope will make it easier for more people to use PhantomJS. Check it out at www.BromBone.com.

The service just launched (literally minutes ago). I'm hoping some brave souls from this mailing list will signup for a (free) beta account and provide some feedback. Let me know what doesn't work and what I am doing wrong. Please tell me if you run into any bugs or stability problems.

BromBone pretty bare bones right now. There are three different http calls you can make. PNG, to get a screenshot. HTML, to get a snapshot of the DOM. EVAL to execute javascript tests on the page and get results back. Of course there is more to come. Mouse movement, setting cookies, changing resolutions, and more. I'd love to hear some good real life use cases. How might you use a service like this? What could I add to make it really useful to you?

I hope this doesn't come across as spam. Honestly, I'm not even ready to spam anyone yet. I've got a minimal service working, and I'm just dying to get some feedback from some people who might actually use it. Thanks.

[Bryan Bishop]

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 11:49 PM, Chad DeShon <chad....@gmail.com> wrote:
> PhantomJS is great. I'm launching a "headless browser as a service," which I
> hope will make it easier for more people to use PhantomJS. Check it out at
> www.BromBone.com.

There was another one that was mentioned a few days ago. What was it?

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

[James Greene]

Chad —

Cool, kudos to you!

Some quick feedback just from looking at your home page:

1. Love the plan names (i.e. characters from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow). Clever!  :)
   
   
2. The "Run JavaScript test" URL would be convenient for 1-liner scripting but you may want to consider offering a POST equivalent so people can post an actual JavaScript file at you to pass [its contents] to the `page.evaluate`.

Sincerely,
    James Greene

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 11:49 PM, Chad DeShon <chad....@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Richard Kiss]

You're probably thinking of my site http://lnkvu.com/ which is mostly working now, although the fade-in/fade-out is a little flaky at the moment.

[Bryan Bishop]

On Sat, Mar 9, 2013 at 9:21 PM, Richard Kiss <richar...@gmail.com> wrote:
> You're probably thinking of my site http://lnkvu.com/ which is mostly
> working now, although the fade-in/fade-out is a little flaky at the moment.

Nah, it was a hosted phantomjs service too.

[Bryan Bishop]

On Sat, Mar 9, 2013 at 9:32 PM, Bryan Bishop <kan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 9, 2013 at 9:21 PM, Richard Kiss <richar...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> You're probably thinking of my site http://lnkvu.com/ which is mostly
>> working now, although the fade-in/fade-out is a little flaky at the moment.
>
> Nah, it was a hosted phantomjs service too.

Ah, here we go.

http://tubes.io/

The pricing is different by a factor of 10. heh.

[Chad DeShon]

Thanks for the link. I hadn't found tubes.io in my research. Their site looks really nice. It looks like we are taking different approaches. They appear to be more focused on scraping and running javascript in the cloud. With BromBone, the goal is to provide an http api that makes it easy to use a headless browser. I want common tasks to require little or no code.

I've made some improvements based on your feedback. I added the POST call suggested by James and added a delay parameter to give the javascript on the page a chance to execute first. I've also made the first pass at a proper documentation page.

Thanks to everyone who has checked out BromBone.

BromBone.com

[Michael G. Whitfield]

Or you could just use a legitimate JavaScript framework that supports SEO out of the box...

[James Greene]

The snide comment seemed uncalled for.

Basically none of the JavaScript MV* frameworks support SEO out of the box because of their single-page application (SPA) nature. However, this is not a new problem: AJAX-heavy sites have been facing similar SEO troubles for years, which is exactly why Google and other search providers have guides/specs for submitting site "snapshots" to their crawlers.

Thankfully for those running such sites, the rise of Phantom and other higher levels tools built upon it (e.g. http://prerender.io/ ) have made it easier than ever to meet those SEO requirements.

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[Jason Swearingen]

FYI Brombone has pivoted away from phantomjs renderings and is now an AJAX SEO service (like prerender.io).    

If anyone here is looking for a phantomjs service, here is one:   PhantomJsCloud.com 

Right now it only supports rendering (html, jpeg, json)   but if you need other features like page manipulation please let me know.   we will be adding png and pdf output soon.

full disclosure: I'm the webdev+pm of phantomjs.cloud