Re: Javascript and WWW::Mechanize or LWP::UserAgent?

On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, Peter Stevens wrote:

> Under the heading of small serious amounts of work...
>
> I mentioned previously Win32::IE::Mechanize - does anybody have any
> ideas on how to do the same thing with Firefox under Linux?
[...]

Warning: I'm not up-to-date on this, take what I say with a pinch of salt.

I see you want linux, but first a comment about doing this on Windows:

I believe there's a (MS-)COM IWebBrowser2 wrapper of Firefox's XP-COM
interfaces, so *in theory* you should be able to point
Win32::IE::Mechanize at that under Windows.  I wouldn't be at all
surprised if it were much harder than it should be, though (due to the
complexities of COM, XP-COM and Firefox rather than the Perl side
particularly)...  Also, note the comment below about XP-COM only
supporting in-process clients -- not sure exactly how one does things,
given this.

Under linux, I guess you'd have to do one of:

1. Extend the Perl module to interface with XP-COM direct (note XP-COM,
unlike COM, is in-process only IIUC, so I guess you have to rebuild
Firefox with your new code, which may be a "wonderful learning
experience", even if you *are* a battle-hardened C++ veteran ;-)

2. Build Perl support into Firefox.  I don't know if such functionality
still exists in Firefox (there used to at least some support for Perl, but
I have a feeling that was a long time ago, not sure if it's still there...
Also, I don't know if it allowed external processes to talk to the
browser.

3. Forget Perl and just write what you want in JavaScript.  Not ideal, I
know, but practical: obviously JS support is excellent in Firefox.  See
Selenium for inspiration.


John