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Headless Browsers: A Stepping Stone Towards Developing Smarter Web Applications

Web development has grown at a tremendous pace with lots of automation testing frameworks coming in for both front-end and backend development. Websites have become smarter and so have the underlying tools and frameworks. With a significant surge in the web development area, browsers have also become smarter. Nowadays, you can find headless browsers, where users can interact with the browser without a GUI. You can even scrape websites in headless browsers using packages like Puppeteer and Node.js.

Efficient web development hugely relies on a testing mechanism for quality assessment before we can push code to production environments. Headless browsers can perform end-to-end testing, smoke testing, etc. at a faster speed, as it is free from overhead memory space required for the UI. Moreover, studies have proved that headless browsers generate more traffic than the non-automated ones. Popular browsers like Chrome can even help in debugging web pages in real-time, analyze performance, notify devs of memory consumption, enable developers to tweak their code and analyze performance in real-time, etc.

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5 Ways to Request and Parse Web Data

1. HttpURLConnection – Send and Receive Data

HttpURLConnection has been part of Java JDK since version 1.1. It provides methods to send GET/POST requests and receive responses over HTTP protocol. They work with methods in BufferReader and InputStreamReader to read the data.  You don’t need any external libraries.  

This is the code snippet for the HTTP GET request.

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Getting Started With the Puppeteer API for Headless Chrome

Google Chrome is, by far, the most mainstream web browser with its best of all security features and enhanced functionality. It’s easy to use and smooth surfing capabilities have made it the most sought after browser. The concept of web browser automation has been in practice for some time now. Automating browsers, to scrap carrying out redundant and repetitive tasks like screen navigation, filling out forms, taking screenshots, etc that hamper the speed of any application, is a methodology every developer follows. There are various multi-browser automation tools like Selenium, being one of the most popular, as well as other dedicated browser extensions like Chrome Browser extension (CBA) for Chrome, that help carry out smooth web browser automation.

The Rise of Headless Chrome and Puppeteer

In reference to this context, Google Chrome introduced the Headless Chrome functionality to allow automating the browser in a headless mode. The Headless Chrome enables the complete execution of Google Chrome on servers that run without a Graphical User Interface (GUI). It lets you programmatically test your web app without the need for any frontend framework. The entire automated testing process is carried out in the background, without you seeing anything happening in the testing process. Headless Chrome has gained immense popularity in the field of web development, due to its swift and fast execution.