You can use PhantomJS with Node e.g. with child_process and messages via stdout. Works pretty well. Running this in its own process context might actually be a benefit e.g. when you spawn multiple phantomjs browsers
There is a project on github where this was taken a step further via dnode ( https://github.com/sgentle/phantomjs-node ) - you get access to the phantomjs objects, get/set properties and access the phantomjs api methods.
