6 best alternatives to NW.js (w/xvfb) as of 2018 - Slant

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PhantomJS

Top Pro

Supports screen capture

Top Con

Deprecated by Puppeteer

PhantomJS is no longer actively maintained by the original authors. Puppeteer is said to be a replacement supported and backed by the Google Chrome team, now. https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/15344 See More

Top Pro

Used in many open source projects

Including bootstrap, grunt, ember.js, and YUI. See More

Top Con

Browser closes unexpectedly

It often happens when running on more then 5 (my measurement) JVM instances that the browser gets stuck and quits unexpectedly. This can be partially solved by running the instances one by one instead of parallel (this is a problem when testing Jenkins and Bamboo agents) but I don't believe this qualifies as a solution. The error is called UnreachableBrowserException. See More

Top Pro

Supports many browser standards

PhantomJS has full DOM and CSS parsing, JSON, canvas, and SVG support. See More

Top Con

Elements are sometimes not visible

This is an error which occurs with almost no reason, PhantomJS sometimes decides that it cannot click the element even though the element is intractable or enabled. This happens if you have to scroll to see the element (and these are not pages that load elements with JavaScript) which is strange because PhantomJS should catch the whole page if it is not loaded explicitly with JavaScript. This problem partially goes away with re-sizing the browser, but that does not really qualify as a solution. The error it raises is: ElementNotVisibleException. See More

Top Pro

Built on WebKit

WebKit is becoming the gold standard for browser compatibility, making it a good starting point for native headless browser testing. See More

Top Con

Heavy setup

You'll often end up having PhantomJS binaries connected via WebDriver to your testing framework, possibly using client/server especially if you want your test running with something else than Java. This mean an overhead in terms or maintenance and performance, but still usually lighter than running a full browser (like Chrome, Firefox, IE). See More

Top Pro

Active development

Development activity and number of contributors is healthy. See More

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React Native

Top Pro

Allows you to develop native apps

React Native allows you to create native apps by generating native views with JavaScript instead of using a web wrapper. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

React Native is not the most beginner-friendly framework for creating mobile apps with JavaScript. It requires that the developer know React, which is known to have a steep learning curve. See More

Top Pro

Backed by Facebook

Facebook writes their mobile apps in React Native so the code base gets pretty thoroughly used in some highly demanding scenarios. See More

Top Con

If core team doesn't use a certain feature, it's not developed

Whenever there's functionality you need that they don't use in their apps, it's not going to get developed by them, even if it's obvious it should be in the core. They always say to either submit a PR or create a separate module. See More

Top Pro

More predictable control of the state

The one way data flow, makes it more predictable and easy to control. See More

Top Pro

Large, supportive community

Despite being such a young framework (early 2015), the support for React Native grew quickly. There is a forum, active tag on Stackoverflow and many other ways to get help from the community. See More

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Zombie.js

Top Pro

Runs on Node.js

Zombie is built on node.js, making it very easy to integrate with your project and into your testing toolchain. It only requires JavaScript to run. See More

Top Con

Support has waned

As of August 19, 2016, Zombie hasn't received a commit since January 2016. Issues get comments like "patch welcome". See More

Top Pro

Fully featured api based interaction and assertion

The way the api is built makes it very easy to add to your test framework. See More

Top Con

Stale documentation

Full API documentation has been missing since the start, making it frustrating to use. See More

Top Pro

Claims to be "Insanely Fast"

It's a lot faster than fully fletched browsers and a lot lighter. Partly because it really only focuses on headless loading of pages along with their JavaScript (not taking really care of rendering or more visual resources). See More

Top Con

Fails to load many sites

As its JavaScript and DOM engine are mostly "just good enough" and because by design it'll report all errors and stop there, many complex sites will not load properly through Zombie.js. See More

Top Con

No screen-shot

As it doesn't render the page, you cannot get a screenshot to for testing or reporting test failures. See More

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Xojo

Top Pro

Easy to use

Easy to make compiled native apps. See More

Top Con

Subscription-based/Not free

Using this product you're betting the company will still be around. If they get bought out by an enterprise that wants to use the tech internally, all they need to do is stop offering subscriptions and suddenly you're scrambling to rebuild your entire app on other technology. See More

Top Con

No Android support

They plan to eventually support Android, but for now, they only support iOS. See More

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