WebDriver is a wire based protocol drafted by the W3C in order to provide browsers with scripting capability. WebDriver-enabled browsers include Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and PhantomJs. These browsers can be requested to execute JavaScript, load urls, enquire upon doms and more.

This project provides an alternate WebDriver implementation based on Scala, Akka and Spray. The primary benefit of the approach taken here as opposed to many of the existing WebDriver APIs is its reactive nature i.e. the API is non-blocking and event driven, providing a resilient implementation by leveraging Akka in particular. One consequence of the API design is that many WebDriver requests can be executed in parallel e.g. several JavaScript programs can be run simultaneously.

In addition to the reactive network client, support for HtmlUnit is provided. HtmlUnit provides a browser environment to Mozilla's Rhino and executes entirely within the JVM. The consequence of this is that no other browser is required to be installed. The cost is one of performance given that Rhino is not faster than a native browser. That said, HtmlUnit is invoked across multiple threads and so performance may be adequate for many use-cases.

Sample usage can be obtained by inspecting the webdriver-tester sub-project. There's a main class that illustrates essential interactions. Here is a snippet of it:

val browser = system.actorOf(PhantomJs.props(), "localBrowser")
browser ! LocalBrowser.Startup
for (
  session <- (browser ? LocalBrowser.CreateSession).mapTo[ActorRef];
  result <- (session ? Session.ExecuteJs("return arguments[0]", JsArray(JsNumber(999)))).mapTo[JsNumber]
) yield {
  println(result)
  ...

The above illustrates how a browser can be launched, a session established and then some arbitrary JavaScript sent to it through the session.

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