redseven is a highly customizable browser automator. It is useful
for scraping web content that is protected by some manner of login
system or even deliberately obfuscated. Many systems do not provide an
API, or the API provided is limited in some manner. An example is an
online banking system.
Online banking usually requires a complex login - perhaps
username+password, then certain letters from a secret word, then a
number generated by a secureID type dongle. This is probably great for
security, but its annoying if I just want to check my balance.
Redseven can easily handle the above scenario. It has almost unlimited
use-cases for more nefarious purposes such as scraping or spoofing, and
can succeed where more simple approaches such as wget scripts or
hand-rolled java scrapers fail due to deliberate obfuscation of content
access. Because Redseven uses an internal implementation (provided by
the Qt toolkit) of WebKit, it appears to servers as a webkit browser.
Javascripts run in the browser as normal, as do flash players.
It works on linux, and should run on anything that a recent Qt toolkit
can be installed on (this includes windows).
If anyone would like custom scripting for a specific site, I may be
able to help - get in touch via the forums.
