Here’s my presentation from Mashup Camp II.

To view this presentation you’ll need a computer to which you can download, install and run a Web browser.

Wait … you already have that?

Isn’t HTML great?

That’s half the presentation right there. For all the hype around Web services, SOAP and RDF, sometimes its the simple protocols that do the most. So let’s use some HTML/HTTP.

I start by busting a few of the myths surrounding HTML/HTTP and scraping in general. In real life it works better than you’d expect.

How come? Because simple solutions are more resilient than we give them credit. And what’s easy to build, it also easy to test and easy to fix.

The second part shows how to scrape eBay auctions in ten lines of code. There’s also a very brief introduction to Ruby, just enough to understand the examples. If you know Ruby, skip that. If you don’t know Ruby, change that!

And it ends with metrics from a real live application. You know the one I’m talking about.

I wrote the framework so I can spend less time writing scrapers, and more timing working on features that matter. So have fun and explore.

N.B. Someone asked if you could use scrAPI for testing Web UIs. Yes. But you might find assert_select easier to use. It shares the same code and style (pun intended) but geared towards test cases.