Re: State of the AJAX Union

On Fri, 3 Nov 2006, Christopher Hart wrote:

> I know there is a rich history of challenges implementing any kind of
> JavaScript interpretation using Mechanize or any other web
> scripting/automation utility, but I was wondering if anyone has tried to
> focus on "Mechanizing" AJAX?
>
> I realize this would take at least some degree of JavaScript interpretation
> and most likely some kind of internal DOM representation to maintain the

No doubt you could profitably concentrate your implementation / bug-fixing 
effort on the DOM features you're interested in, but I don't think there's 
any terribly obvious closed subset of the DOM &c. that you could implement 
and save yourself lots of work as compared with implementing the full 
monty.


> state of the page, and that it's probably extraordinarily challenging.

Probably only extraordinarily challenging in that it involves lots of work 
-- that's why nobody has done it :-)


> Nonetheless, with the increasing popularity of AJAX, it seems like it
> eventually needs to be done.  I'm watching more and more of the sites I've
> written automation for slowly migrate to AJAX and it's getting increasingly
> difficult to work around these designs.
[...]

Whether or not it "needs" to be done, it won't be, unless somebody steps 
up to do it.


John