How to programmatically logon and retrieve data from site?

Question

I wondered if someone might be able to give me some pointers. I've done a small amount of web development before and I'd like to approach the task below.

What I want to do is automatically login to the website below and pull the balance of my credit card onto the screen. So effectively all I would see is a couple of login boxes a login button and then when filled in the next screen would show my balance.

https://service.aquacard.co.uk/aqua/web_channel/cards/security/logon/logon.aspx

I thought about doing this with a web app. What I'm envisioning is I do an http get on the page and then render the page with a custom css so it hides everything apart from the relevant bits.

Alternatively, I guess I could use something like nokogiri or mechanize to to act as a headless browser and automate the task.

However, I'm really struggling to get started and have read several guides. So I wondered if someone could help me out to get going. It's an aspx page and I've got a node.js environment up and running if I could use that...

At the moment I'm thinking a client-server type architecture but in the future I'd like to move to client only (i.e. a native app).

Answer 1

You didn't mention in which language you want to write but I can only recommend you Selenium. It's used for automated testing in the browser, so it's able to find elements on the page, fill them with values and so on. It also has binding for multiple languages (Java, C#, Python, Ruby) so pick up the one you like the most.