Monitoring DOM changes on the server side with node.js

I'm wondering if its possible to load a website like the twitter search results page using node.js with jsdom and still be able to detect any changes in the DOM after the initial render.

Example:

Initial开发者_StackOverflow page

Modified page

Thanks for your help.

If you want to detect what changed in the DOM tree you will need to understand the minified Twitter's javascript code and properly intercept the events or callbacks. I don't suggest you this approach because js code that works perfectly in browser may break when using jsdom. For instance, when I was trying to do some server side scrapping with jquery I got stuck with this bug that in most browsers is definitely not an issue.

For the time being, what I recommend is that you consume the Search API directly from Twitter which is a more straightforward approach.

Hope it helps!

Certainly the best approach is to leverage the Search API (or whatever relevant API) from Twitter to accomplish this.

But if, for some other project, you want to host a full browser environment (JS + dom + renderer) that remains alive and lets you interact with it, the PhantomJS project might work:

http://code.google.com/p/phantomjs/

It hosts a WebKit instance for automation.