Well, well, here we go...
We have a java applet running on a regular browser (ff4+ or ie5+).
I do NOT have access to the java code / servlet. Nor even to the server.
I NEED to send/retrieve data from this applet. This means i must emulate an user onto it by clicking buttons and filling form's textboxes and also return data (after server response) wich ll be inside textboxes.
So the technologies avaibles to be used are C, VB, .NET (webbrowser object mainly), PHP (cUrl avaible), JavaScript, Sniffing the browser/server communication using Fiddler.
We really need this. But if thats impossible so we may have to know also.
The data is owned by my company so no copyrigth is inflicted.
Also i'm open to non traditional solution such as saving the html as an image and then retrieve the data using some OCR software...
Well so any suggestion or pointing directions would be gratefully appreciated.
Thx
Paulo Bueno.
Having to emulate a user browsing is wrought with problems and i would suggest an alternate route, if its feasible. These are the steps I would take:
Grab the applet class or jar from my cache (anyone accessing the page / applet can do this).
Decompile the code into Java source (Using jad or other preferred tool)
Review the process with which the applet communicates to the service
Write an application to submit my data to the service that the applet connects to and handle any responses just as the applet would.
You can run any applet without a browser using the "appletviewer" that is shipped in a JRE. This way it is possible but not practicable to read and send fake input with http://code.google.com/p/windowlicker/ to control the SWING GUI.
But within a regular browser environment with access to the code you would rather do this:
using the "scriptable" and "mayscript" attributes/elements in your object tag. standard browser JREs include a "plugin.jar" that contains the needed function to do this job. This interface lets Java-Applet code communicate vice versa to Javascript, from wich you can do whatever you want (i.e. ajax request)
this topic is rather complex, so check out what google tells us:
http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/applets/_APPLET_MAYSCRIPT.html
http://www.raditha.com/java/javascript.php
Using this interface is a real pain, so i suggest to implement HTTPRequests within your applet to tell the PHP server whatever you want to tell it.
regards,
Michael
I do NOT have access to the java code / servlet. Nor even to the
server.
Emm... It is quite unusual situation. If you have the applet, of course, you should have access to its src files to modify :)
I NEED to send/retrieve data from this applet. This means i must
emulate an user onto it by clicking buttons and filling form's
textboxes and also return data (after server response) wich ll be
inside textboxes.
Anyway, to "emulate" user you can use the Robot object but still it will demand you to modify the applet code to make it support some additional functionality... As I can remember, JS etc cannot control Java Applet from the outside commands unless the applet does contain JS supported functionality for web page interaction... But still you say you don't have any access to the applet src so there is no information does the applet support netscape.javascript or not and how it support it so it is quite unclear... So I must ask do you have any docs of this applet?
Comming around the question text and getting back to the question title itself which says
"How can I extract data from a Java applet (inside the browser)"
I may suppose to say that
To extract data from Java Applet you can use netscape lib which supports Java Applet and JS interaction example, docs. That is the most optimal way in this case
Good luck
Might not be too difficult to de-compile/change/compile again the applet unless it is obfuscated.
I use JAD.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31353/is-jad-the-best-java-decompiler
If you must get your data by interacting with the java applet instead of reverse engineering it, check out FEST (Fixtures for Easy Software Testing). FEST is designed for testing Java Swing GUIs by simulating user interaction, but you can easily use it to automate your applet as well.
Check out the documentation page on testing applets to get started.
Related
I want to stress test a system based on Apache Wicket, using grinder.
So what I did was that I used grinder's TCP Proxy tool to record a test session in my Application and then fed the generated test script to grinder to stress test the system; but we found out the tests aren't carried out successfully.
After a lot of tweaking and debugging, we found out that the problem was within the wicket's URL generation system, where it mixes the page version number into its URLs.
So I searched and found solutions for removing that page version number from the URLs (Like this), and used them and they worked and removed those version numbers from the URLs used in the browser. But then again, the tests didn't work.
So I inspected more and found out that even though the URLs are clean now, the action attribute of forms still use URLs mixed with page version number like this one : ./?4-1.[wicket-path of the form]
So is there anyway to remove these version numbers from form URLs as well? If not, is there any other way to overcome this problem and be able to stress test a wicket web application?
Thanks in advance
I have not used grinder, but I have successfully load-tested my wicket application using JMeter Proxy; without changing Wicket's default version mechanism.
Here is the JMeter step-by-step link for your reference:
https://jmeter.apache.org/usermanual/jmeter_proxy_step_by_step.pdf
Basically, all I did was running proxy server to accept web requests from the browser to capture the test scenarios. Once done collecting the samples, then change the target host url to whichever server you want to point to (other than your localhost).
Alternatively, there is another load testing tool BlazeMeter (compatible with JMeter). You could add the chrome browser plugin for quick understanding.
Also, you might want to consider mounting your packages to individual urls for 'cleaner' urls. That way, you have set of known urls generated for pages within same package (for example, /reports for all the reports pages within reports package).
Hope this helps!
-Mihir.
You should not ignore/remove the pageId from the urls. If you remove them then you will request a completely new instance of the page, i.e. you will lose any state from the original page.
Instead of using the href when recording you need to use the attribute set (by you!) with org.apache.wicket.settings.DebugSettings#setComponentPathAttributeName(String).
So Grinder/JMeter/Gatling/... should keep track of this special attribute instead of 'href' and later find the link to click by using CSS/XSLT selector.
P.S. If you are not afraid of writing some Scala code then you can take a look at https://github.com/vanillasource/wicket-gatling.
This is an age-old question regarding perl web scrapers after Web 2.0; they simply cannot parse dynamically loaded pages because they need some sort of JavaScript engine in order to render the page. This issue is much more involved than simply rendering JavaScript, since Perl would also have to be able to manage and maintain the DOM.
It seems WWW::Selenium and WWW::Mechanize::Firefox is able to accomplish this by utilizing FireFox (or other browsers) to do the rendering for it. However, V8 has become so popular (as seen with Node.js), so I'm curious if there are any new libraries that utilize it or there has since been a browser-independent solution, which I'm not aware.
I might usually consider this a closable question, but with so few results when Googling and on Stack Overflow, there shouldn't be too many solutions (if any).
Related (older) Questions:
How can I use Perl to grab text from a web page that is dynamically generated with JavaScript?
How can I handle Javascript in a Perl web crawler?
You mentioned Selenium but there is the later version Selenium::Remote::Driver which works with a selenium 2.0 hub.
I see you can also use it without a Selenium hub
Without Standalone Server ( I haven't used this part)
As of v0.25, it's possible to use this module without a standalone
server - that is, you would not need the JRE or the JDK to run your
Selenium tests. See Selenium::Chrome, Selenium::PhantomJS, and
Selenium::Firefox for details. If you'd like additional browsers
besides these, give us a holler over in Github.
PhantomJS may be of interest as it is a headless browser
This is probably not an answer but it was too long for a comment
I have little business problem, I need to make a script to fill (not send) out browser forms(only simple textfields, checkboxes and drop downboxes).
I need to launch multiple windows with the same form with different data to speed up form filling
What kind of scripting/programming do I need to use to fulfill these needs(Batch, JS .. ) ?
I have knowledge only of java, and basic html,c,c++ ... so if I can get basic tutorials I would be grateful indeed.
I have bits of ideas of how this is possible - through IDs of various field on the page which I can access to edit their values, so I just need language specific tutorials/suggestions.
Batch would be preferable if possible, because i need to execute the script through a java swing program.
P.S : If this is of any relevance, only browser acceptable is IE
dont think its possible through Batch,
I think easiest would be javaScript for this task. (chill js is pretty easy)
You can write a simple javaScript to fill in form
You should find how to fill form through javaScript helpful
Then you can use ScriptEngineManager to execute javaScript from your java code.
This tutorial should be helpful :execute javascript from java
You can't fill HTML-fields with a Batch-File. The easiest way is to use Javascript an Greasemonkey in Mozilla Firefox. You can find Tutorials here.
An other way to send data to an WebServer is to use in C/C++/Java Sockets and the HTML-Protocol.
I have a simple Java applet with several text fields for input.
I would like to be able to somehow cache what the user enters into these fields so that next time they run the applet, they can make a selection from a list of previous inputs.
I have been searching forums and sites and cannot find any way to do this for applets.
Does anyone have a suggestion or a kick in the right direction?
If you're running this in a browser, you could try using cookies.
As well as cookies, here are a few more possibilities.
HTML5 offers Web Storage which can be accessed from the applet using JS.
An applet running in a Plug-In 2 JRE can be deployed using JWS and use the PersistenceService to store data. Here is a demo. of the PersistenceService.
A trusted applet can read/write the local file-system, but probably overkill for this.
I have a web based application using Primefaces with a very basic plug-in like architecture. The configuration of these plug-ins was all handled with xml, which is not so user friendly system.
I would now like to allow for each plug-in to be configurable via the web application, what are my options?
I have looked into Portals and Portlets but that seems like a rather big change to my application and my plug-ins do not require such complex user interfaces, a textbox or two of configuration is more than enough.
Does anyone have any suggestions or advice and what would be the best route here?
Create a simple page , per plugin that read the XML file, parse the option that you want to change , present it to the user with a simple interface, and save back the XML file.
Take care of the saving part and password-protect this page!