Perl is a generally excellent language for gluing applications together for the purpose of testing them. For your application, it sounds like you want an automated web client that fetches pages, stuffs them with info, and submits them. There are a number of CPAN modules that help you do just this.

I have used LWP::Simple to good effect. Here is a snippet that gets a weather web page: 
   use LWP::Simple;
   my $state = shift;
   my $url_base = 'http://iwin.nws.noaa.gov/iwin/';
   $state = uc $state;
 
   # get the raw HTML page for $state
   my $url = lc($url_base . "$state/zone.html");
   my $raw_data  = get($url);

[download]
There are many other LWP modules that offer great flexibility in web programming.

-Mark

In reply to Re: Automation by kvale
in thread Automation for performance tests by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.