Not quite Mafia: "Relay override" for other web sites/pages?

T

tragus

Member
Yes, I know this isn't a real Mafia question, but I'm curious if there are tools around for a type of generalized "relay override" that would work with another website. My naive understanding of Mafia's "relay" is that manipulations occur using KoL's API, not actually having a full overlay over an "unaltered" web page.

At work, I have the "pleasure" of working with a *very* klunky and error-prone web interface. However, for many political reasons, I cannot/will not get access to the underlying database or otherwise be able to recode any parts of the system. To my knowledge, there is either no API for the system AND/OR I cannot get access to it. Briefly, the architecture is a mixture of mySQL, TomCat, Java, and Velocity on Apache.

Can any savvy coders give me any pointers to methods of being able to programmatically construct a "meta" interface into the existing mess? That is, I want to build my own interface that will interact the set of [existing, dynamic] web pages to do things like error/consistency checking of page contents, automatically entering text into fields, etc. Or is this a hopeless mess that I shall learn to endure without complaint? Simple macros for some tasks won't work due to the dynamic nature of the template/content PLUS per-session tokens. If someone has insights, and wishes to take the conversation to PM, I'd be happy to explain any of the other constraints I have the joy to work with.
 
roippi

roippi

Developer
I've seen some people do some impressive things with Firefox's Stylish plugin, but I don't know if it can do everything you're looking for. I've never programmed for it myself.
 
G

Grotfang

Developer
As roippi says, it really depends what you are looking to do. You can do wonderful things with stylish (although it currently doesn't work on firefox 7). In addition, you could consider using more generic CSS overrides if that is useful to you. See this google group thread for more information. Finally, if you have a server available, you could use PHP to pull information from the site (assuming it's in the public domain) and format them in a way you preferred. This is the more complicated option, though.

It really depends on what your problem is. If presentation is the problem, look at Stylish, etc to see if you can remedy that. If data pulling is the issue/limiting factor, then you need something to grab that in the first place. If you don't have a server available, then you could also consider producing an html page (that can be stored and accessed locally) and use JavaScript to produce the various server hits needed to pull together and format multiple data hits.
 
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