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Phantomjs VS Composer

Compare Phantomjs VS Composer and see what are their differences

Phantomjs logo Phantomjs

PhantomJS is a headless browser that works hand in hand with Selenium to help developers more efficiently test their sites and apps.

Composer logo Composer

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP.
  • Phantomjs Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-29
  • Composer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-19

Phantomjs features and specs

  • Headless Execution
    PhantomJS can run scripts without the need for a graphical user interface, making it ideal for automation tasks such as web scraping and automated testing, especially in CI environments.
  • Full Web Stack
    It fully supports a range of web standards like DOM, CSS, JavaScript, and even SVG. This makes it highly versatile for different types of web interactions and manipulations.
  • Screenshots
    PhantomJS allows for easy capturing of web content as screenshots, which is useful for visual testing, performance analysis, and content verification.
  • Network Monitoring
    The tool offers capabilities for monitoring network traffic and performance, enabling developers to gather insights on resource loading times, HTTP status codes, and other networking metrics.
  • Simplicity
    PhantomJS provides a straightforward API, making it relatively easy to use and integrate into development and testing workflows even for developers with limited experience in scripting.

Possible disadvantages of Phantomjs

  • Deprecated
    Active development of PhantomJS has been discontinued. This means no new features, improvements, or security updates will be released, which can pose significant risk for long-term projects.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running headless browsers can still be resource-intensive. PhantomJS may consume considerable CPU and memory, which could become a bottleneck in high-performance environments.
  • Limited Modern Web Compatibility
    As the web evolves, new standards and features are introduced. Being discontinued, PhantomJS may lack support for the latest web technologies, potentially leading to rendering discrepancies or failures.
  • Difficulty in Debugging
    Debugging headless browser scripts can be more challenging compared to using full browsers with developer tools, making it harder to resolve complex issues that arise.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    While the API is straightforward, mastering PhantomJS scripting and effectively dealing with asynchronous JavaScript operations and browser-specific quirks can be difficult for beginners.

Composer features and specs

  • Dependency Management
    Composer allows for easy and efficient management of PHP dependencies, ensuring that the correct versions are used and conflicts are minimized.
  • Autoloading
    Composer supports autoloading, which means you don't have to manually include or require files, reducing boilerplate code.
  • Version Control
    It allows developers to specify and install the exact versions of the libraries they need, which helps in maintaining consistency across different environments.
  • Community Support
    Composer has a vast and active community, resulting in a plethora of libraries and packages readily available for use.
  • PSR Compliance
    Composer adheres to PHP-FIG PSR standards, promoting best practices and interoperability among PHP projects.
  • Custom Repositories
    Ability to use custom repositories allows for flexibility, enabling enterprises to create their own repository for internal use.

Possible disadvantages of Composer

  • Learning Curve
    Beginners may find Composer overwhelming due to its command-line interface and the complexity of managing dependencies.
  • Performance
    Installing or updating packages can sometimes be slow, particularly for projects with many dependencies.
  • Dependency Conflicts
    While Composer aims to minimize conflicts, complex projects can still face issues with dependency resolution that require manual intervention.
  • File Size
    Projects using Composer can lead to increased file sizes due to the inclusion of multiple libraries and their dependencies.
  • Security
    Including third-party packages can expose a project to potential security vulnerabilities if those packages are not well-maintained or audited.

Phantomjs videos

How to use PhantomJS with Selenium?

More videos:

  • Review - DrupalCon Portland 2013: AUTOMATED TESTING WITH JASMINE AND PHANTOMJS

Composer videos

AI vs Human Music Composer 2019 - Orb Composer Review

More videos:

  • Review - Review Composer Cloud from EastWest / Soundsonline.com
  • Review - Behringer Composer PRO-XL MDX2600 Review (AUDIO TEST)

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Phantomjs and Composer)
Development Tools
19 19%
81% 81
Javascript UI Libraries
21 21%
79% 79
Libraries And Widgets
27 27%
73% 73
Automated Testing
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Phantomjs and Composer

Phantomjs Reviews

Top 10 Best Selenium Alternatives You Should Try
PhantomJS is an open-source, scriptable headless browser intended for automating webpage collaboration. It is also a powerful testing tool that supports various web standards and makes it appropriate for automation and integration with CI tools.
6 Popular Headless Browsers for Web Testing
Complexity is commonplace in the modern internet landscape, and PhantomJS is built to handle it all using basic command line testing. This headless WebKit is scriptable via the JavaScript API and uses CasperJS to handle testing. Capable of simulating “full navigation scenarios,” PhantomJS can reveal all the places where a user may encounter errors while browsing.
Source: www.keycdn.com
Introduction to Headless Browser Testing
PhantomJS supports headless testing with the use of CasperJS. CasperJS is a navigation scripting & testing tool for PhantomJS. It allows you to build full navigation scenarios using high-level functions and a straight forward interface to accomplish all sizes of tasks.

Composer Reviews

We have no reviews of Composer yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Composer seems to be a lot more popular than Phantomjs. While we know about 143 links to Composer, we've tracked only 11 mentions of Phantomjs. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Phantomjs mentions (11)

  • youtube bandwidth throttled for cloud addresses?
    Install Phantomjs and see if that improves things. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • How to Bypass Cloudflare in 2023: The 8 Best Methods
    Automated Browser Detection. Cloudflare queries the browser for properties that only exist in automated web browser environments. For example, the existence of the window.document.__selenium_unwrapped or window.callPhantom property indicates the usage of Selenium and PhantomJS, respectively. For obvious reasons, you're getting blocked if this is detected. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Ask HN: What's the best way to get all the HTML from a JavaScript site?
    I know there is https://phantomjs.org/ but is there something else people use these days? The issue is some websites curl works fine to get all the rendered html, but some you don't get any content without a javascript engine. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • Detecting PhantomJS headless browsers
    Despite the popularity of Puppeteer and Headless Chrome, my team of threat researchers and I wondered, to what extent PhantomJS was still being used by bot developers. In this post, we share how we identified traffic associated with PhantomJS, the types of attacks performed, and its use in comparison to Puppeteer Extra Stealth. Source: over 2 years ago
  • How to make a SPA SEO crawlable?
    I've been working on how to make a SPA crawlable by google based on google's instructions. Even though there are quite a few general explanations I couldn't find anywhere a more thorough step-by-step tutorial with actual examples. After having finished this I would like to share my solution so that others may also make use of it and possibly improve it further. I am using MVC with Webapi controllers, and... Source: almost 3 years ago
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Composer mentions (143)

  • Arguments a customer can understand not to use WordPress
    There is also no requirement to follow the PHP-FIG standards. The best thing that is build because of those standards is Composer. The most plugins I downloaded while writing use composer. The problem is that the plugins ship with their own vendor directory. While the standard is to have one vendor directory for the whole project. This results in different packages with the same or different version of it in the... - Source: dev.to / 16 days ago
  • Insights from the PHP Foundation Executive Director
    “Extensions are now very close to being like packages; they basically look like Composer packages. It’s still open to discussion whether PIE will be part of Composer someday. It’s not decided yet, but I hope it will be,” Roman added. - Source: dev.to / 21 days ago
  • PHP Core Security Audit Results
    Dependencies are managed by Composer (like npm, cargo, etc) for more than 10 years now. https://getcomposer.org. - Source: Hacker News / 25 days ago
  • WordPress and Components
    Composer and Packagist have become key tools for establishing the foundations of PHP-based applications. Packagist is essentially a directory containing PHP code out of which Composer, a PHP-dependency manager, retrieves packages. Their ease of use and exceptional features simplify the process of importing and managing own and third-party components into our PHP projects. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • 2025 Best PHP Micro Frameworks: Slim, Flight, Fat-Free, Lumen, and More!
    Simplicity: Getting started is a breeze—install via Composer, define some routes, and you’re off. Scaling up? Add middleware or libs like Twig or Eloquent as needed. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Phantomjs and Composer, you can also consider the following products

jQuery - The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library.

React Native - A framework for building native apps with React

Babel - Babel is a compiler for writing next generation JavaScript.

OpenSSL - OpenSSL is a free and open source software cryptography library that implements both the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols, which are primarily used to provide secure communications between web browsers and …

Raven.js - Raven.js is a standalone JavaScript client for Sentry.

Symfony - A PHP full-stack web framework