Mechanize 0.2.0 released

http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/

by iamelgringo • 16 years ago

48 19 16 years ago

wwwsearch.sourceforge.net

alttab• 16 years ago

We use the mechanize ruby gem for integration with other sites and web applications - doing things that are not exposed through APIs but only interface. Really cool!

Way better than Net::HTTP

croby• 16 years ago

This is a fantastic library. Great to see that it's still moving along.

Now, if it only had a way to execute javascript....

mumrah• 16 years ago

I imagine you could use python-spidermonkey to execute isolated bits of JS. But yes, getting the window object into context in python would be super useful

olaf4• 16 years ago

Unfortunately, Perl-WWW::Mechanize does not yet handle Javascript, has anybody (Perl, Python, Ruby) a solution for that? DOM+Javascript simulation comes to my mind. Or maybe a fully controllable browser component (where DOM and JS are built-in) with an API. Anyone with first-hand experience?

paraschopra• 16 years ago

You can use Java based HTMLUnit. Emulates a headless browser complete with Javascript and DOM.

kunley• 16 years ago

There's awesome JRuby wrapper around it: Celerity

I went the route: Mechanize -> HtmlUnit (from inside Clojure to be more scriptable) -> ended with Celerity and most happy.

iamelgringo• 16 years ago

Have you looked at Selenium? It might have more of what you're looking for.

hugs• 16 years ago

Things like Mechanize and HTMLUnit are what I call "HTTP-only protocol drivers" and are not a true-fidelity simulation of the HTML+JavaScript environment. This is exactly the reason I created Selenium in the first place. I had regression bugs in IE and Mozilla that I needed to verify were fixed in the actual browsers. An emulated browser environment like Mechanize or HTMLUnit isn't a real browser that users actually use, so it doesn't solve the regression testing problem I had.

Best of both worlds these days is in driving a headless WebKit (a true browser driver that includes the JS interaction), which will be coming in Selenium 2.

olaf4• 16 years ago

Not yet, thanks for your tip.

aantix• 16 years ago

Yes, along the same lines, you could use Waitr.

http://www.layeredthoughts.com/automation/how-to-write-your-...

jbarnette• 16 years ago

Aaron Patterson (the maintainer of Ruby's mechanize) and I have been working on this on and off for a few years. Take a look at http://github.com/jbarnette/johnson, http://github.com/mynyml/harmony, and http://github.com/mynyml/holygrail to see where things are heading.

olaf4• 16 years ago

Thanks, harmony looks interesting, can actions like "set form field", "click button" etc. be programmed?

tomjen3• 16 years ago

Internet Explorer.

No seriously, IE is fully controllable via COM and you can use pretty much any scripting language you want (the python COM api is pretty nice, so is the ruby one).

Steve Yeggey had a post on the subject some time ago: http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/scripting-windows-a...

BTW, MS Office has a similar feature.

whiskeyjack• 16 years ago

Nifty. Always glad to see cross-pollination in the Ruby/Python/Perl world.

sunkencity• 16 years ago

It is such an awesome library. Totally rocks.

To get a quick glimpse of how easy it is to work with look at this screencast: http://railscasts.com/episodes/191-mechanize

lunchbox• 16 years ago

Also worth checking out is Scrapy: http://scrapy.org/

It's a Python scraping framework based on Twisted. It lets you use some of Mechanize's API to describe the scraping jobs.

Mechanize 0.2.0 released

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