CPAN WWW::Mechanize

CPAN:WWW::Mechanize is a CPAN module that helps you automate interaction with a website. It supports performing a sequence of page fetches including following links and submitting forms. Each fetched page is parsed and its links and forms are extracted. A link or a form can be selected, form fields can be filled and the next page can be fetched.

CPAN:WWW::Mechanize::TWiki is a subclass of WWW::Mechanize to interact with TWiki sites. Author is WillNorris.

Alternatives are CPAN:LWP::UserAgent and CurlTool.

-- Contributors: MartinCleaver, PeterThoeny

Discussion

Looks nice, but without a parent or backlinks, I'm having trouble with the context. What do you envision it being used for ?

-- KeithHelfrich - 28 Apr 2007

We get sometimes question in the support web how to automate update to TWiki content: BulkUploadTopics, HowToScriptPageModification, HowtoAddTopicsRemotely, MassUpdate.

There are extension to manipulate content: GlobalReplacePlugin, UploadToTWikiAddOn.

-- PeterThoeny - 28 Apr 2007

We implemented a fully automated software release and continuous integration system based on TWiki. At the time I had a look at some TWiki client library on CPAN but decided to implement my own based on CPAN:LWP::UserAgent .

It's pretty cool now, you define your tasks on a topic then a remote machine reads the topic and executes the tasks locally. Results and outputs are published on another topic. Thus we just have to look at the latest software release in our release Web and download the binaries from the relevant topic. I'll have to publish that system at some point.

I'm not sure how to package it though: it's a set of *.pm, *.pl and CGIs running on the client machine (or executer machine) which actually runs a web server itself to publish it's status (busy or not) and allow us to trigger a remote task (like a new software release) from the TWiki web site. On top of that there are a bunch of TWiki topics: form definitions, task definitions, executer registration, executer machine list, task starter etc... those would need re-work before being published.

Anyway I strayed a bit from the TWiki client story just wanted to provide an example of TWiki client usage and that one is at the heart of our software release process.

-- StephaneLenclud - 30 Apr 2007

I published that TWiki client mentioned above as part of ExecuterContrib.

-- StephaneLenclud - 14 May 2007