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Comment by sho | Hacker News Reader

Huh? What he did is completely automatable, you don't have to touch Firefox. And if you really did need JS to log in, which I have never seen outside misguided banks, there's tools for that too. Selenium and JSSH come to mind but for 99% of sites you'd just need Mechanize.

And Java? Why the hell would anyone write a script in a compiled language like Java? Desperate for that 2ms time saving between 10 second waits for the pages to come down, eh? And any for-real scraping script would have a time delay built in anyway.

The guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

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The example wasn't written in Java for performance gain. It so happened that I had NetBeans open , and it was easier for me to write it in Java at the moment :).

Easier!? You wrote pages and pages describing the most inefficient way imaginable to do something I can do in 5 lines of Ruby, and you call it easier? And unless I'm very much mistaken, you'd have to compile the code anew whenever the cookie changed?

Well, good luck to you, and the more script kiddies you confuse the better I guess, but there are seriously much better ways to do this. Go look at Ruby Mechanize (I think it's also available for python); coming from Java you will be blown away by just how easy this kind of thing is. How do you think we all test? ; )

Update: Oh I see you know Mechanize from another article. So why not just use that ... you do know it can do all that logging in stuff for you, right?

Yes, I have worked with mechanize before. I was using mechanize even when there only was the perl version. I added a comment to the article explaining my choice.

Fair enough. I guess the surprised reaction you're getting is because web testing frequently involves doing this kind of thing, so, being a community of web programmers, everyone here knows it backwards. I didn't really think of the angle you mentioned where someone wouldn't know all the relevant techniques and just want to get something working ASAP. For that, taking the cookie from FF might indeed be a time saver.

Anyway always good to see everyone chime in with their opinion so thanks for the conversation starter.

BTW, is anyone else nervous about the day the teenage h4xx0rs discover how easy this kind of thing is these days ..

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