Application automation

Question

hi all,
does anybody know a way/method to automate a web user activities such like logging into a web site and retrieving relevant information from the internet?
is it possible using the servlet package in J2EE? how about using URLConnection and javax.swing.text.html.parser package? thanks

Answer 1

In my case, I would like to create and application
n much like a web robot that is able to traverse a
website plus logging into a website and download
files. (with information provided to the application
of course). Thus some consideration i'm having is to
how am i going to handle cookies which is used by
webservers for session handling. thanks.http://httpunit.sourceforge.net/
The normal way to access web sites is via a browser; however, there are times when it is desirable to bypass the browser and access a site from a program, including:
* automated web site testing
* using a web-site as part of a distributed application
HttpUnit makes this easy. Written in Java, HttpUnit emulates the relevant portions of browser behavior, including form submission, basic http authentication, cookies and automatic page redirection, and allows Java test code to examine returned pages as text, an XML DOM, or containers of forms, tables, and links.
The above is more of a testing tool than something to download sites, though... if you were after a spider, you could try...
http://www.matuschek.net/software/jobo/
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=java+web+robot
-Troy