George Smith - 2012-10-03

Dear SilverTunnel Specialists,

I have been using SilverTunnel Netlib within my own Java applications successfully in the past few years. However, there is now a need to use Selenium Webdriver 2 (http://seleniumhq.org/docs/03_webdriver.html) to carry out sophisticated detail web scraping, where one can drive a browser such as Firefox to accurate navigates & query web applications followed by parsing results for further processing internally. The challenge is how to pass a SilverTunnel URL Stream Handler such as the example used in the past to Selenium Webdriver 2 API:

    NetLayer lowerNetLayer = NetFactory.getInstance().getNetLayerById(NetLayerIDs.TOR);
    lowerNetLayer.waitUntilReady();
    NetlibURLStreamHandlerFactory factory = new NetlibURLStreamHandlerFactory(false);
    factory.setNetLayerForHttpHttpsFtp(lowerNetLayer);
    String urlStrSilverTunnel = "http://www.abc.com";
    URLStreamHandler handler = factory.createURLStreamHandler("http");
    URL context = null;
    url = new URL(context, urlStrSilverTunnel, handler);
    ...

….

This approach would be much preferred to the other Silvertunnel Netlib option, where all outgoing URL connections of a JVM would be redirected regardless.

Any idea on whether it is possible to incorporate SilverTunnel Netlib with other OpenSource applications such as Selenium Webdriver 2?

Also, when will SilverTunnel Netlib be releasing its first GA be available? Will this ever take place? It has been many years since and it is still in its beta testing phase.

Thanks,

George