Re: Developing a Suite of CGI applications

Check out http://www.screen-scraper.com. It's Java, it's not done, I couldn't find the download, but it's author is developing it under GNU GPL, it looks like the generalized version of what you want, and at the very least, you might be able to share experience. (There are screenshots, so the author's got something of a working app.)

And say, this largish application wouldn't be SAP R/3 would it?

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Comment on Re: Developing a Suite of CGI applications

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Re: Re: Developing a Suite of CGI applications by jordanh (Chaplain) on Sep 16, 2002 at 01:31 UTC
I just looked at it. Looks like it would have to go a long way to be what I need. This is not primarily a screen scraper, but rather, scraping screens to get information (following next page links if necessary), then taking that information and issuing Post or Get Forms based on it. I need to perform audits on every page, making sure the application structure hasn't changed in some subtle way, and I want to be able to integrate confirmation dialogues. I do the equivalent of all of that, today, with command-line scripts. The most complex one is about 300 lines long and that includes a bunch of cut-and-paste subroutines that I could modularize. All I need to do is wed this kind of thing to CGI applications, an area that Perl shines in, and I'm there. Why should I take this detour into the interminable infrastrucure monster that is Java development, when Perl makes this stuff so easy? And say, this largish application wouldn't be SAP R/3 would it? No. I wouldn't call SAP R/3 largish, I'd call it humongous.	[reply]

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Re: Re: Developing a Suite of CGI applications
by jordanh (Chaplain) on Sep 16, 2002 at 01:31 UTC

This is not primarily a screen scraper, but rather, scraping screens to get information (following next page links if necessary), then taking that information and issuing Post or Get Forms based on it. I need to perform audits on every page, making sure the application structure hasn't changed in some subtle way, and I want to be able to integrate confirmation dialogues.

I do the equivalent of all of that, today, with command-line scripts. The most complex one is about 300 lines long and that includes a bunch of cut-and-paste subroutines that I could modularize. All I need to do is wed this kind of thing to CGI applications, an area that Perl shines in, and I'm there.

Why should I take this detour into the interminable infrastrucure monster that is Java development, when Perl makes this stuff so easy?

And say, this largish application wouldn't be SAP R/3 would it?

No. I wouldn't call SAP R/3 largish, I'd call it humongous.

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