webotron
Using industrial automation techniques for creating web scraping tools
...Control programs must be robust, yet simple enough to be understood and maintained by non programmer skilled trades like electricians .
The main programming model is the PLC which implements double buffering and an event loop. The most advanced production model relies on smart pallets and autonomous workcells. Each workcell itself will consist of smaller autonomous workcells with very simple signalling used between workcells.
All hardware must extremely robust and well sealed from the surrounding environment.
The webotron project is a program environment which emulates the above for building web scraping tools using temporary Add-on programs running in the Firefox browser. ...