3 ms·

Maybe I'm mistaken, but the name rings a bell from a scraper company I worked at some 10 years ago (I left that company in 2008). Our scraper back then was lig

Maybe I'm mistaken, but the name rings a bell from a scraper company I worked at some 10 years ago (I left that company in 2008). Our scraper back then was light years ahead of any others, both in regards to performance (think checkpointing of program state) + accuracy of parsing and JS execution (back then the target goal was a complete emulation of IE6+, sans ActiveX (exception being various host objects such as XMLHttpRequest)) This scraper was easier programming then anything else out there (think visual domain specific programming language). 7 years after having left that company I was called into an interview at a rather big HR company, with them essentially asking me to meet and greet a group of 20 people, all of them working with an old old version of said software, that I had worked on releasing - as a team of two - many years prior. Quite the bizarre encounter telling them how to work with a product that was IE 5.5 compatible, and drawing on old legacy knowledge for said purpose.

shubhamjain 10y ago
> Our scraper back then was light years ahead of any others, both in regards to performance (think checkpointing of program state) + accuracy of parsing and JS execution (back then the target goal was a complete emulation of IE6+, sans ActiveX (exception being various host objects such as XMLHttpRequest)) If you don't mind, can you tell me the name of the software? I was very much into scraping business myself around 2008. One of things I failed to do was to scrape a site made in ASP.NET Webforms. I was looking for software that could emulate Javascript and I think can recall something of that sorts that I saw.
- qadevleadgrunt 10y ago
  Software was Kapow RoboSuite, it's since been going through a few acquisitions and can now be found at http://www.kofax.com/data-integration-extraction http://www.kofax.com/data-integration-extraction. The web site really doesnt tell a great story of the technical details, best thing is probably http://www.kofax.com/~/media/Files/Kofax/Datasheets/kapow/ds-kofax-kapow-en.pdf http://www.kofax.com/~/media/Files/Kofax/Datasheets/kapow/ds...

shubhamjain 10y ago

> Our scraper back then was light years ahead of any others, both in regards to performance (think checkpointing of program state) + accuracy of parsing and JS execution (back then the target goal was a complete emulation of IE6+, sans ActiveX (exception being various host objects such as XMLHttpRequest)) If you don't mind, can you tell me the name of the software? I was very much into scraping business myself around 2008. One of things I failed to do was to scrape a site made in ASP.NET Webforms. I was looking for software that could emulate Javascript and I think can recall something of that sorts that I saw.

qadevleadgrunt 10y ago
Software was Kapow RoboSuite, it's since been going through a few acquisitions and can now be found at http://www.kofax.com/data-integration-extraction http://www.kofax.com/data-integration-extraction. The web site really doesnt tell a great story of the technical details, best thing is probably http://www.kofax.com/~/media/Files/Kofax/Datasheets/kapow/ds-kofax-kapow-en.pdf http://www.kofax.com/~/media/Files/Kofax/Datasheets/kapow/ds...