Musings on Control

A while back I wanted a simple system for automating sending text messages via the internet.

There are a few friends I've got on different plans where I can send them messages via a form on the internet. And I wished to automatate this so I could say "at 9pm send this".

However i couldn't work out how. The obvious solution of WWW::Mechanize doesn't work in my case because of the extensive use of Javascript a lot of providers want.

So I came up with another plan.

SendKeys

SendKeys is a thing that Visual Basic programmers might recognise, it's a simple means of injecting keypresses into windows.

I wrote some XLib code for faking key presses + releases into random windows and all is good.

I could then write a simple parser which understood two options:

• Executing a program
• Sending keys to it.

My first program was:

#!/home/skx/bin/faker
execute mozilla-firefox http://www.random.com/
sendkeys "[tab]5555-1234[tab]This is a message[tab][ret]" 

This works, but it doesn't allow for much customization, or flexability.

It also didn't deal well with the popup windows I have to use for some programs, where I want to use something more complex.

I realised I needed to use conditionals:

if ( ! findWindow( "mozilla-firefox"  ) )
  execute( "mozilla-firefox" );
fi

..

So I have three choices:

• Write a proper grammar and parser.
• Rewrite my code as a Perl/Ruby/Python extension and do the logic in that.
• Hookup my functions "execute", "sendkeys", "findwindow",etc to the C intepretter cint

I think I like the idea of the last one best .. but I'm probably going to be doing one of the first two.

Perl is my favourite language, but this would be a fun way of learning to write Ruby extensions.

Of course now I need to think of a name!

I guess we're talking of something that is analagous to "expect", but for GUIs.

Right now I'm thinking of something like XLib::SendKeys.

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