About the project

Why such package?

The main motivation behind Manen is to provide a better developer experience when working on browser automation and web scraping project. Most automation and scraping tools provide basic methods to interact with the browser and with the DOM, but don’t provide the structure to keep the code clean and maintainable. Manen aims to be the interface between the core of the automation tool (only Selenium is supported for now) and your tests and workflows logic; just focus on your use case and let Manen handle the browser interactions.

The main answer to this objective is with the implementation of the Page Object Model design pattern. This pattern is a way to organize your code by creating a class for each component of your application, and to put all the interactions with the page in this class. Such classes should be focus on the interactions with the page and not on the interactions with the DOM. The latter is handled by Manen; you specify the selector and what you want to extract from each element (the text, an integer, a date, the inner HTML), and Manen will do it for you. Special objects like inputs also have their own Manen representation, so you can easily fill the value in a Pythonic way. Besides, Manen provides what is called Browser, which are basically a new class based on Selenium WebDriver, but with some ameliorations and shortcuts.

Note that the design of the page object model implementation in Manen is fully based on type annotations, largely inspired by Pydantic. This way, the developer experience is improved not only during the runtime but also during the development, in your IDE.

Putting the page object model into practice isn’t a new topic (quite old actually, Simon Stewart, a lead in the Selenium project, wrote about it in 2009), but Manen aims to provide a modern and Pythonic way to do it. Here are some articles and resources which inspired and drive the development of the project:

• Page object models, by Selenium

• Page Object, by Martin Fowler

• [in french] Page Object Model : l’heure de la retraite ?, by Younup

Current status and roadmap

Manen is still in beta version, but it is already usable for some use cases. The solution Manen aims to provide are implemented, but some elements can be missing before being fully usable. Some improvements and features are already on the way (implement more DOM elements, compatibility with other browser automation tools, etc.), all of them targeting the same objective: provide simple yet powerful tools for browser automation.

If you are interested in the project, you can already use it and are more than welcome to provide any feedbacks! You can use GitHub issues to describe your use case, your needs, or any bug you encountered. If you want to contribue to the project, you can check the Contributing page of this documentation.

Attention

Because Manen is still in beta, the API can change between minor versions. Keep an eye on the Changelog to see the changes between each release.