On Wed, 19 Mar 2003 10:06:30 -0500, Andy Stoffel 
<Andrew.Stoffel at jenzabar.net> wrote:

> Just a random question. I would like to use Squeak to access
> a web 'application' that uses WAY TOO MANY bits of Javascript.
> (and frames but that's a different issue...)
>
> So I need to be able to "extract" the intent of the Javascript though
> I don't want to really USE the Javascript.... and I don't really want
> to use a web browser (which is too limiting for what I have in mind...)
>
> Just wondering if someone has done something similar.
>

For a stress-tester at work (written in JAVA, don't ask) we determined that 
the easiest thing to do was to visually determine the "intent" of the 
JavaScript, and then use simple line-parsing to find things of the form 
"someVariable = someValue" to scrape out the parameters to the client side 
of the application, and finally REIMPLEMENT the client side of the webapp 
in JAVA.  (Sorry for the shouting, working on that particular project still 
stings a little.)  If you come up with a better solution, I'd love to hear 
it.  What we found was that for every little change in the webapp an 
equivalent little change was required in the tester, but since the tester 
only ever got used every 6 months or so every time it was needed it took 
someone a week to go back and figure out what changed (AKA why is it 
broken?) and update as required.  Painful and expensive.

-andrew

-- 
andrew_c_berg at yahoo.com