Hacker News Reader

Comment by geoscripting | Hacker News Reader

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 :).

View on HN

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 ..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com