On Message with Ben Gross

I’ve been experimenting with a Firefox extension called CoScripter (formerly Koala). It’s still a research project that is hosted on IBM AlphaWorks, but you can see potential. Essentially, it records browser actions (mostly with forms) into a human readable and human editable scripting language. These scripts can then be replayed in the browser and modified for different uses.

CoScripter is interesting because it provides a way to automate repeated tasks on the web. There are enough web-based interfaces that have complicated multi-page form entry (think government services) that providing an automated way to complete them is useful. The CoScripter web site includes a number of examples including: clearing the bulk and trash folders in a Yahoo account, signing up for the national Do Not Call list, and updating the status on various social services such as Facebook and Twitter.

The CoScripter language is flexible and there is more than one way to accomplish the same action, but is still limited at this point. For example, there is no way to increment a counter, make a loop, or do much of anything with AJAX. IBM has provided a wiki and an automated mechanism for users to share their scripts with one another.

There is also a way to go through the actions step by step which could be useful as a limited demonstration mechanism. IBM says it is working on adding more programming by example functionality. CoScripter is developing into a useful tool that is worth taking a look at.

There is a high quality video of how the CoScripter works on the IBM site. There is a lower resolution version on YouTube that loads quickly.

The authors presented a paper on CoScipter at this year’s Computer Human Interaction (ACM CHI) conference which goes into more detail.

Koala: Capture, Share, Automate, Personalize Business Processes on the Web by Greg Little, Tessa A. Lau, Allen Cypher, James Lin, Eben M. Haber, Eser Kandogan. CHI 2007, April 28–May 3, 2007, San Jose, California, USA.

Related posts

Google Reader Now Available Offline At the recent Google Developer day, Google released offline functionality for Google Reader, it's browser based feed aggregator. The offline functionality is en ...

1Password — the Login Manager and Form Filler for the Mac and iPhone Briefly, 1Password is an application to manage passwords and auto-fill web forms for the Mac, the iPhone, and the iPod Touch. At first pass, the functionality m ...

Link roundup for 10/1/07 mitchell's blog: Mozilla's New Focus on Thunderbird and Internet Communications: The CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, Mitchell Baker describes the launch of a ne ...