Programming Spiders, Bots, and Aggregators in Java

The content and services available on the web continue to beaccessed mostly through direct human control. But this is changing. Increasingly, users rely on automated agents that save them timeand effort by programmatically retrieving content, performingcomplex interactions, and aggregating data from diverse sources. Programming Spiders, Bots, and Aggregators in Java teaches you howto build and deploy a wide variety of these agents-fromsingle-purpose bots to exploratory spiders to aggregators thatpresent a unified view of information from multiple useraccounts.
You will quickly build on your basic knowledge of Java to quicklymaster the techniques that are essential to this specialized worldof programming, including parsing HTML, interpreting data, workingwith cookies, reading and writing XML, and managing high-volumeworkloads. You'll also learn about the ethical issues associatedwith bot use--and the limitations imposed by some websites.
This book offers two levels of instruction, both of which arefocused on the library of routines provided on the companion CD. Ifyour main concern is adding ready-made functionality to anapplication, you'll achieve your goals quickly thanks tostep-by-step instructions and sample programs that illustrateeffective implementations. If you're interested in the technologiesunderlying these routines, you'll find in-depth explanations of howthey work and the techniques required for customization.