A Custom Browser Architecture to Execute Web Navigation Sequences

Abstract

Web automation applications are widely used for different purposes such as B2B integration and automated testing of web applications. Most current systems build the automatic web navigation component by using the APIs of conventional browsers. This approach suffers performance problems for intensive web automation tasks which require real time responses and/or a high degree of parallelism. Other systems use the approach of creating custom browsers to avoid some of the tasks of conventional browsers, but they work like them, when building the internal representation of the web pages. In this paper, we present a complete architecture for a custom browser able to efficiently execute web navigation sequences. The proposed architecture supports some novel automatic optimization techniques that can be applied when loading and building the internal representation of the pages. The tests performed using real web sources show that the reference implementation of the proposed architecture runs significantly faster than other navigation components.