Running JavaScript in perl by proxy

BaldPenguin has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Fellow Monks:

I have a device where JavaScript support is spotty and AJAX support is nil, and yet I want to consume some web services where the only access is through AJAX. My initial thought is to build a proxy in perl on the server side to do the consuming, and then parse the data in a re-write to the client browser using either XSL to transform one page into the other or maybe even using the raw JSON object. Getting modules or code to post and read web pages is WELL documented. What I need is a way to run JavaScript inside the perl code.

Has anyone seen this yet? Is there a JavaScript VM accessible from inside perl?

Any help or advice is appreciated.

Don
Everything I've learned in life can be summed up in a small perl script!

Comment on Running JavaScript in perl by proxy

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Running JavaScript in perl by proxy by Joost (Canon) on May 08, 2007 at 17:57 UTC
If you want to run code in a browser (which you will need to do the XMLHttp requests) you have several choices: Win32::IE::Mechanize and Mozilla::Mechanize are WWW::Mechanize re-implementations based on Explorer and Mozilla. I don't know much about Win32, but Mozilla::Mechanize is quite hard to install, since it has tons of dependencies. An alternative are the Selenium modules. Those should be platform and browser independent. "What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"	[reply]
Re^2: Running JavaScript in perl by proxy by BaldPenguin (Friar) on May 08, 2007 at 19:52 UTC
From what I have been told and seen to date, Mechanize and it's derivatives do not process the JavaScript within the page. Is that assessment incorrect? It may be possible to find the script nodes and process them with JavaScript, but that would get a little hairy when it came to the src includes inside a page. Don Everything I've learned in life can be summed up in a small perl script!	[reply]
Re^3: Running JavaScript in perl by proxy by Joost (Canon) on May 08, 2007 at 20:13 UTC
WWW::Mechanize doesn't do javascript, but the other Mechanize and Selenium modules I mentioned provide a scriptable API but use "normal" GUI browsers to do the real work. Which means they do more or less everything IE/Mozilla/Safari do, including Javascript. "What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"*	[reply]
Re: Running JavaScript in perl by proxy by gloryhack (Deacon) on May 08, 2007 at 17:07 UTC
Try JavaScript or JavaScript::Context.	[reply]