automating selenium 101

Question

I'm just getting started with selenium:

package selenium;

import java.util.List;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;
import java.util.logging.Logger;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;

public class SeleniumWebPage {

    private final static Logger log = Logger.getLogger(SeleniumWebPage.class.getName());
    private final LinkFacade lf = new LinkFacade();

    public SeleniumWebPage() {
    }

    public void processLinks() {
        List<Link> links = lf.getAll();
        for (Link l : links) {
            processLink(l);
        }
    }

    private void processLink(Link l) {
        WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();  //don't display
        driver.get(l.getLink());
        driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(9, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
        String s = driver.getPageSource();
        log.info(s);
        driver.close();
    }
}

Apparently it's not really possible, or at least not quite the same, to run a "headless" version of WebDriver?

In an event, Does this give all the javascript from the live page? Optimally, I would like to click links, fill in fields, etc, and then log, as above, any changes to the console.

Is it possible to achieve this with WebDriver?

In order to click links, fill in fields and so forth, it's necessary to build some logic to parse the HTML elements?

Answer 1

Yes, you can run headless with either Headless Chromium or with PhantomJS ..

Keep in mind that running with Selenium Grid or SauceLabs is equally as good as running headless.