We use it in our CI, just before deployment, to compare the DB structure of what's being tested with the DB structure of our staging or production environment.
It's a last minute check that prevented a lot of mistakes.
Well, it's up for debate. We automate websites on behalf of our users (that is, logged in as them). Which means the site knows at all time who's doing what and can take action in case of abuse.
Also, we see more and more ruling indicating that scraping is in fact legal. Websites can block users according to their ToS but they can't take legal action against them or us. Maybe.
In any case, our platform also provides the tools for anyone to automate any website (make them into an API). That part is just a developer tool.
It's similar in the sense that it's a listing of APIs. But we're providing non-official APIs that work by automating / scraping websites. Our platform runs Headless Chrome instances behind the scenes.
We're developing a library[1] for this use-case. The goal is to have the same simple API for multiple browsers. Right now it supports both Headless Chrome and PhantomJS.
We think we'll begin work on Firefox headless soon. PRs welcome :)
They're a hassle-free way of getting the data. No need to worry about CORS, sessions, cookies, CSRF and other modern web stuff. Just simulate a human and you’re in.
Thanks for this. I would use it but you only do HTTP requests, right? It would be great if you could also do a true ICMP ping (like the name suggests!)