Chapter 25. WRITING FAULT-TOLERANT WEBBOTS
The biggest complaint users have about webbots is their unreliability: Your webbots will suddenly and inexplicably fail if they are not fault tolerant, or able to adapt to the changing conditions of your target websites. This chapter is devoted to helping you write webbots that are tolerant to network outages and unexpected changes in the web pages you target.
Webbots that don't adapt to their changing environments are worse than nonfunctional ones because, when presented with the unexpected, they may perform in odd and unpredictable ways. For example, a non-fault-tolerant webbot may not notice that a form has changed and will continue to emulate the nonexistent form. When a webbot does something that ...
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