Chapter 28. Writing Fault-Tolerant Webbots
The biggest challenge in developing webbots is making them run reliably. 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 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 is impossible to do ...
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