March 2018 Summaries

PhantomJS, once a popular tool for continuous integration, has been effectively abandoned following the resignation of its sole maintainer, Vitaliy Slobodin, who cited challenges in supporting multiple platforms and the superior performance of Chrome. In March 2018, PhantomJS's creator, Ariya Hidayat, officially announced the archiving of the project, with version 2.1.1 being its last stable release. In response, users are advised to transition to Headless Chrome, which Semaphore supports with preinstalled versions, for better speed and stability. Alternatively, Selenium with Firefox is recommended for its reliability. The contributions of PhantomJS developers are acknowledged, and community discussion is encouraged via Discord.

Brendon Murphy, CTO at Kajabi, explains how the company significantly reduced its continuous integration (CI) build time for its complex Rails application from 45 minutes to around 10 minutes by implementing Semaphore Boosters, an automated parallel testing tool. Kajabi, a SaaS platform for Knowledge Commerce, faced challenges with its slow test suite due to manual balancing of parallel runner configurations, which was tedious and inefficient. After researching potential solutions, the team adopted Semaphore Boosters, which offers automatic self-balancing and a user-friendly interface akin to Heroku's slider, allowing for more reliable and scalable test builds. The setup was straightforward, although it required addressing some intermittent failures in their suite. Ultimately, the integration of Boosters improved build reliability and allowed more frequent deployments, aligning with Kajabi's goal of reducing manual overhead and enhancing the development process.