Revisor

Revisor is an remotely-controlled lightweight browser mainly designed for integration testing and automating tasks. It's based on C++/Qt4/WebKit and is cross-platform, fast, and memory efficient (well, at least it should be). Revisor was designed with minimalistic approach in mind, so it aims to have less features and small codebase.

Revisor is NOT production-ready yet, but who cares? As developer, you should definitely give him a try. And of course, Revisor is under active development, so all your patches and suggestions are welcome.

Quick overview

Revisor is a small HTTP server combined with small WebKit renderer. It listens for HTTP commands and executes them. Commands are hashes serialized to JSON. Responses are JSON hashes too. You just create a command, send it to Revisor and get response. Very simple. Obey.

Why Revisor is better?

Or "Why Selenium sucks?" Because:

• No Java Required
• No fight with Same Origin Policy.
• It's lightweight and easy to use. You don't need to run Big Firefox with all it's unnecessary GUI and plugins.
• It allows to have completely separate "sessions" within one Revisor process. With Selenium you need to start as many Firefox instances, as many sessions you need.
• Revisor could be used from almost any environment, because it uses HTTP and JSON to communicate with clients.

Compilation

You need Qt 4.6 and ArgTable2 to compile Revisor.

$ sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev libargtable2-dev
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ qmake ../revisor.pro
$ make

That's all!

Usage

To use Revisor, just run it's executable and start sending requests.

$ ./revisor -l 127.0.0.1 -p 8080 &
  Revisor is listening "127.0.0.1" on port 8080 PID xxxx
$ curl --data "command={name:'session.start',session_name:'Hello world!'}" http://127.0.0.1:8080/command

Revisor comes with Ruby helper library, which you might find useful. This library contains object-oriented client API, usage examples and test suite.

Command reference

session.start

Starts a new session.

• session_name - name to use for created session

session.stop

Stops existing session and closes all tabs associated with it.

• session_name - session name to stop

session.tab.create

Creates a tab within a running session.

• session_name - existing session name
• tab_name - name to use for newly created tab

session.tab.destroy

Destroys an existing tab.

• session_name - session name
• tab_name - tab name to destroy

session.tab.visit

Open URL in tab.

• session_name - existing session name
• tab_name - tab to use
• url - URL to open

session.tab.wait_for_load

Waits for page load. If page is already loaded, returns immediately.

• session_name - session name
• tab_name - tab name
• timeout - wait timeout in msec, default is 0 (no timeout) [optional]

session.tab.evaluate_javascript

Executes JavaScript in tab context and returns value of last statement.

• session_name - session name
• tab_name - tab name
• script - script source to execute

session.tab.set_confirm_answer

Sets answer for JavaScript confirm() function.

• session_name - session name
• tab_name - tab name
• answer - answer in boolean representation (OK - true, Cancel - false)

session.tab.set_prompt_answer

Sets answer for JavaScript prompt() function.

• session_name - session name
• tab_name - tab name
• answer - string answer
• cancelled - boolean value indicates if 'Cancel' button was pressed

session.tab.save_screenshot

Saves screenshot of current page to image file.

• session_name - session name
• tab_name - tab name
• file_name - file to render page to
• viewport_width - width of resulting image
• viewport_height - height of resulting image

session.set_cookies

Update cookies information or add new ones.

• session_name - session name
• url - if domain or path attributes of cookie are not set, they will be extracted from this URL
• cookies - array of objects containing information for cookies. Those objects has following keys:
  • name - name of the cookie
  • value - value of the cookie
  • path - URL path where cookie exists
  • domain - domain where cookie exists
  • expires_at - when cookie expires
  • http_only - "HTTP ONLY" flag (?)
  • secure - can this cookie be transfered through unencrypted connections

session.get_cookies

Retrieve list of actual cookies for specified URL.

• session_name - session name
• url - URL to get cookies for.

session.tab.send_mouse_event

Sends mouse event to a web page in specified tab.

• session_name - session name
• tab_name - tab name
• type - type of event: ['click', 'button_press', 'button_release', 'dblclick', 'move']
• x - event x coordinate, relative to page
• y - event y coordinate, relative to page
• button - button for click, button_press, button_release or dblclick events, one of ['left', 'right', 'mid', 'xbutton1', 'xbutton2']
• buttons - array of buttons for move event
• modifiers - array of keyboard modifiers: ['shift', 'control', 'alt', 'meta', 'keypad', 'group_switch']

Copyrights

Copyright (c) 2009 Mikhail Lapshin (sotakone at sotakone dot com), released under the MIT license.