The bad news is that if you choose the wrong tool you'll have a heck of a time unwinding the mistake. The good news is that these products are different enough and the choice is pretty clear.

We said earlier that a web application manipulation tool is one that drives a web site based on a link back to your backend application containing workflow and data driven information. In a real world setting this tool must have the following characteristics:

• Supported application - from a commercially viable vendor or an active OSF-type community
• Mature product - must have developers documentation and have deployment successes
• Flexible - Must handle a wide variety of web-based applications

There were only four real world candidates that were close enough to analyze:

• Macro Express
• iMacro
• CoScriper
• AutoIt

I was going to lump Chickenfoot in with CoScripter but I will break it out as it has some particularly interesting academic shortcomings.

I would have dinged both of these tools as not being mature - CoScripter is less than a year old and ChickenFoot is barely 6 months.  I really don't care how smart the guys at IBM or MIT are - that's not a mature product.

But there is another problem with CoScripter, from IBM.  And the problem is IBM.  Normally (unless you remember OS/2!) it is a good thing to buy software from IBM, but it's not exactly in their software strike zone, is it?  Oh,  well, yeah, it's free and everything,  but how does it fit in with their Linux strategy?

It doesn't.  So CoScripter is only as alive as the interest of the researchers working (part time) on it.

ChickenFoot is even worse: senior project at MIT.  Next year, aside from NOT getting the girls, these guys  will be doing what, exactly?  Again, open source, but is that your business?

Here is where the wheels really come off ChickenFoot.  It uses a pattern matching engine to figure out what it wants to click when you say click(“Submit”).  If there are, say, five submit buttons then you have to write a buncha javascript.  Uh, dude, how fragile is that?

AutoIt is in the third incarnation, has an incredibly active community, and receives regular updates.  Best of all, it’s free, small, and looks a lot like visual basic.  And you can call Windows system level ‘stuff’ as well as COM, DOM, and all those other overloaded Microsoft Acronyms.

Which is the real problem:

The web side is pretty much, well, krep.  You can smack mouse click into exact locations in a programmatic window that you overlay on an IE region.  And if that sounds like using a laser cannon to heat your Beenie Weenies, well, it is.

MacroExpress has many of the same powerful windows features of AutoIt but with numerous web features built in.  It is a well supported VB runtime like product, with a relatively active user group and lots of examples. 

It does not handle Java U/I issues, Ajax, Flash, etc.  I'd say that for plain vanilla HTML apps their web automation would work pretty well.  And, yes, I am aware that this is a diminishing crowd.

It costs under $40 and you get about that much support.  The user group/forum seems pretty effective, but there are persistent bug complaints that seem to go unresolved.

This product is several years old, is installed in a host of major corporations and startups.   Of all the products, this is most like tools from 'the old days.'   I was reminded more of MultEdit or WinZip or some other product with a cadre of developers and a wide installed base.

When you buy iMacro (and the developer license starts at $500 and goes up pretty quickly) you get support.  Just like a real product.

iMacro can handle Java, Direct Screen, Ajax, etc, etc.  It can even do fuzzy image recognition of bitmapped objects on screen.  Frankly we've been unable to find a situation where we couldn't  bang on an application using iMacro.

This is probably pretty obvious: iOpus iMacro.  For your amusement, I've placed the candidates on our SEO capability matrix, but I think I can summarize why this really works best: it is the simplest solution.  It has a lot of sophistication under the covers, but a simple glass bottle full of red wine can have a lot of complexity, and history, and artistry too.  So don't be fooled - the buys at iOpus have crafted a specialized tool that eschews the useless and focuses on completing a job just exactly right.

We'll start giving some concrete SEO examples using iMacro and some of the architectural framework we've discussed in earlier posts.