Catalyst SmartBrowz

Introduction

SmartBrowz is a Catalyst browser service that enables you to manage and control a headless browser in Catalyst’s cloud environment through a wide range of components.

With the Headless component of SmartBrowz you get to connect to a remote browser with an automation library of your preference and perform any browser function in a secure manner. Headless can be used for a wide variety of purposes that include testing the functionality of a web application, browsing the internet without sharing your personal data, or securely opening and navigating online content from untrusted sources.

You can engineer logic using Browser Logic (a Serverless Function type) to perform any task on the remote browser programmatically. You have the flexibility to initialize, test and deploy this function using the Catalyst CLI, or you can directly upload this function to the Catalyst console at any time. Browser Logic functions can be coded in the following programming languages:

• Java
• Node.js

The access and application activities of the Browser Logic function will be logged in the Logs component of Catalyst DevOps.

SmartBrowz also allows you to generate PDFs and take screenshots of webpages. Using basic scripting languages, you can create and design Templates, a component of SmartBrowz, and store them for recurring use.

All the operations that you can perform in the Catalyst SmartBrowz console are listed below:

• You can configure the memory and version of the remote browser you wish to implement in the Headless mode.

• You can copy the required endpoints and code snippets to configure a remote browser in headless mode and manage it using a browser automation library of your preference. The API KEY required to authenticate the endpoints will be automatically generated and present in the console.

• You can view how a webpage appears across multiple devices using the Screenshot feature of the PDF & Screenshot component. Using the same component you can also generate a PDF of any webpage from the console using multiple input format types.

• You can directly upload any Browser Logic function to the console using the Browser Logic component.

Catalyst provides you with dedicated SDKs in following programming environments to ensure you can implement the PDF & Screenshot component of SmartBrowz dynamically:

• Java SDK
• Node.js SDK
• Python SDK

Catalyst also offers you an API that you can use to produce a PDF or Screenshot of a webpage of your preference.

Using the Templates component, you can even customize, design and store templates of webpages, documents, designs, and more in the console. You can use these templates to generate multiple PDFs or Screenshots of them with dynamic content.

Catalyst SmartBrowz also offers you the Dataverse component, that allows you to perform meaning data scraping operations using powerful Catalyst APIs.

You can familiarize yourself with the various functionalities of SmartBrowz by practicing with them in the tutorials section.

You can refer to each component help section for individual use cases for each.