most powerful web automation

[kalos]

hello!

while I am quite (not completely though) satisfied with GUI automation (I use AHK for this), I still havent find an easy way for web automation

learning JS, Greasemonkey and such is kinda cumbersome and has severe limitations (eg. cannot write data to a simple text file)

I have so far, found these tools:
Mechanize
UBot
Selenium
Watir

are there any more?

which is the best? the most powerful? even if I have to learn more

thanks!

[Renegade]

I've done a LOT of this. But I use Visual Studio and either the stock WebBrowser control, or some other web browser control.

That gives you the most power quickly. Other than that, you need to start doing the networking yourself.

It's not very hard, and you can do quite a lot very easily. However, you need to know C# or VB.NET or some other CLI/CLS language, e.g. F#, IronPython, IronRuby, etc.

This is REALLY old:

http://renegademinds.com/TipsTricks/DevelopersCorner/WebFormSubmitter/tabid/82/Default.aspx

But shows some basics for submitting a form in VB.NET. You can probably find more stuff at the Code Project.

[kalos]

looks good, but I only work with firefox and opera

[Renegade]

looks good, but I only work with firefox and opera

You can get Mozilla web controls as well. I've used them in the past.

http://se7en-soft.com/moznet/getmoznet.aspx

That's a good one. It's basically the same as Firefox.

[kalos]

okay, I am tempted

is it portable? is it standalone?

[Renegade]

Yes - it is portable and standalone (unless you go out of your way to make it not).

But remember, you need to actually program to do it. It's not really all that hard, but you really need to know regex as well to make things easier.