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To The Web Bot Developers!

by Kentauros
2 replies
Hi,

Right now i have fine knowledge of java programming , so i want to move on into web bots like for example : programming facebook bot or twitter bot or tumblr bot and so on ....

So to the web bot developers that who already builds this kind of bots , can you tell me where to start (any resources)? . i heard about selenium and htmlunit and jsoup but i'm not sure if this all what i need ?!...

Thank You So Much!
#bot #developers #java #web
  • Profile picture of the author ExMachina
    Web developer for 15 years here. It's a fascinating field! My best creation is a fully automated Craigslist posting bot system.

    It depends on what you want to learn / do regarding bots! You generally have two different kinds

    1) Headless, browser-less bot. These are your basic API-interfacing scripts... you can write screen scrapers with a HTML parser. The downside is that the bot does not process Javascript so is quite easy to detect!

    2) Automated browser bot. Selenium fits into this category. Much more brittle than bot 1 because you are inspecting the DOM to traverse around. It is more stealthy than the first type of bot because it DOES process Javascript, but it is prone to breaks. And don't even get me started on how to scale Selenium!

    Hope that helps! Writing bots is fun AND profitable.
    Let me know if you have any questions.
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  • Profile picture of the author Techieleech
    It all depends the purpose of the bot I would say. If it is a simple "like bot" then you don't need to have a strong base in JS or Java, You could simply write a chrome extension to do that.
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