I’ve been toying with similar concepts for rich client applications. Using URL monikers, data inside rich client apps can be directly accessed, forms and dialogs too. These URLs can be emailed from a user to another. What’s not to love about this kind of application?

The personal database is stored as a text file in your Firefox profile directory, not on the server. It will be interesting to watch how the vocabulary of personal database entries evolves over time. I imagine people will start creating a namespace for things like email addresses and passwords, so for example you’d call it a “facebook login” and “facebook password”. Different scripts could then refer to different entries by name. But I expect this to be driven by the community and how they decide to use this tool.

I absolutely agree with you about scripting desktop applications. I’d love to see CoScripter’s “sloppy programming” approach be used to control all sorts of applications, and not just on the desktop. Could we use it to program VCRs? Or teach our parents how to use newfangled cellphones?

But I think what’s most interesting is not CoScripter itself, but what it enables. We’ve watched Facebook grow from an application into a platform for developing social-network applications. I can’t wait to see what people build on the CoScripter platform.

Comment by Tessa Lau — September 6, 2007 @ 5:27 pm

I’cant understand how do it ?

As you note, it’s very similar to how you write howtos, or for my line of work, how I write acceptance tests and specifications/scenarios.

This, for me, is the strength of rules engines. And you can prove they don’t break.

But unfortunately it has “failure” written all over it — because you’re required to sign up for an IBM ID before downloading the extension or using the site.

This would be a great tool for explaining actions to non-web-savvy users, but the requirements to get it running are such that they’ll never use it!

Step 1: Long registration for an IMB ID

Step 2: Install a Firefox extension

Step 3: load and run script

That’s way too complicated for the audience base that would find such scripts useful.

On the other hand, in the last months I have been using iMacros, which is a Firefox extension very similar to CoScripter. It uses the “classical” record & replay approach. With iMacros I have been able to automate about 60% of all websites using the visual recording only, and another 30% I got to working after tweaking the recorded imacro manually.

>Because there is no button labeled “Password” on Facebook’s login page, the script failed….
If you have to fix something like this manually, I do not think this is “natural” language processing. Every human would have executed the script correctly.

Oh. Duh. I gotcha now :-)

Someone else in the community has already made a copy of my script that uses the variables “facebook e-mail” and “facebook password” instead. So that’s what I mean by getting the community to standardize on variable naming. People who favor using site-specific names will tend to favor that script over mine, and that script will become more popular. And I’m hoping that eventually conventions will arise over what exactly to name things so that people can reuse variables across scripts.