webdrivers VS Poltergeist

Note: Previously "webdrivers" gem was required to automate the installation and update browser specific drivers. But Selenium 4 ships with webdrivers now leading to the webdrivers being deprecated. Quoting the webdrivers Github:

For a lot of these features, we previously had to adopt various 3rd party gems, such as the Puffing Billy proxy (for blocking domains), the webdrivers gem (for auto-updating the Chrome drivers), etc. and although they certainly did a good job for us, now we were able to finally rip them off the project completely:

Hostile integrations using scripts to obtain financial data is trivial. Frameworks such as:

https://github.com/teampoltergeist/poltergeist

is an excellent example of such a framework. Implementing "bank drivers" using such frameworks would not be difficult.

Plaid and others seem to have done an awesome job scaling the hostile integration pattern. However, the idea that Stripe decided to build this in-house rather than rely on Plaid is perfectly reasonable.

After all, the tools to implement such a product are well known.

In our project, we’ve been running system tests (then called rather "Feature tests") since around 2016. System tests use a real browser in the background and test all layers of a Rails application at once: from the database all the way up to the nuances of JavaScript loaded together with the web pages. Back then, we wrote our system tests using Capybara with Poltergeist, a driver that ran a headless Phantom JS browser. Since this browser stopped being actively developed, we migrated our test suite to the Selenium / Webdriver wrapper around Chrome browser around ~2018. Chrome was itself fine for tests automation but the Selenium API was quite limited and we had to rewrite several Poltergeist features using 3rd party gems and tools.