5 ms·

He doesn't need a desktop app. A Javascript app (thus client-side) would suffice.

• semanticist 16y ago
  Same origin policy would stop it from scraping MMR's site unless it was hosted there.
  • lelele 16y ago
    Can you enforce this? Here in Italy some websites forbid crawlers. I guess an user can always run a software over a website, especially on data entered by herself, can't she? Isn't a browser a scraper, too? Just make the user load a page and then harvest data from the DOM.
    • semanticist 16y ago
      The browser enforces it, not the website. You can't use in-browser JavaScript to load a page from a site other than the one you downloaded the JavaScript from. Otherwise any site you visited could load gmail in the background and read all your email. It's inconvenient when you're making client-side applications, but for the web to have any kind of security it's absolutely essential.
      • lelele 16y ago
        Thank you for your explanation. I've tried it. I'm a system programmer, not a web developer, and it shows ;-)
• cullenking 16y ago
  I am pretty sure that origin policies would prevent this from working. I considered using Adobe Air, but, it's probably easier to just bundle a ruby desktop app with a simple UI. nokogiri trumps all when it comes to screen scraping!