Mike Meyer wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > but I supposed the everyone knew that web automation (and in general > > "automation") is only a problem in Linux. > > I don't know it. I don't believe it, either. I automate web tasks on > Unix systems (I don't use many Linux systems, but it's the same tool > set) on a regular basis.
I imagine that "Web automation" is taken here to mean the automation of Web browsers, with all the advantages/issues such an approach entails. The problem on non-Windows systems is the lack of a common (or enforced) technology for exposing application object models: Mozilla has XPCOM which apparently doesn't permit the exposure of enough useful functionality to other processes for "Web automation" tasks (and whose components seem bizarre enough to defeat my casual investigations into automation with in-browser components), whilst Konqueror/KHTML is somewhat accessible via DCOP although the interfaces to much of KDE are somewhat limited. Taking the challenge on board, I decided to build on the existing KPart plugin work done with PyKDE [1] and produce a component which exposes active documents using DCOP [2]. Combined with an extended version of qtxmldom [3] the result is a system which permits out-of-process automation of KHTML and thus Konqueror with the documents available using a PyXML-style DOM. Currently, the work is in an early phase and there's a lot of learning about DCOP and PyKDE to be done, but I think the concept is more or less worked out. If only GNOME and KDE had stuck with CORBA, though... :-/ Paul P.S. Of course, the existing KPart plugins permit in-browser embedding which is easily good enough for many automation tasks, and there are plenty of examples of moderately useful tools and scripts to prove this point. In the revised plugins collection [2], there's a plugin which extracts hCalendar information, for example. [1] http://www.boddie.org.uk/david/Projects/Python/KDE/index.html [2] http://www.boddie.org.uk/python/kpartplugins.html [3] http://www.boddie.org.uk/python/qtxmldom.html -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
