More documentation is needed!

[jschlade]

Hello to the developers of HtmlUnitDriver,

You saved my sanity! Let me explain. I've been using HtmlUnit for a long time and it was working fine but recently within these last 6 months or so I was having trouble logging into a website.

It was driving me crazy because I could only get my app to login during a certain time period of the day. If I tried to login during another time it would reject me so I realized it must be determining that I was logging in through an app.

I could always login using a browser, manually, no problem so I spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out what was different? I turned on debug logging in htmlunit and even with a detailed trace I couldn't figure out how it knew.

But yesterday as I was researching this problem I ran across HtmlUnitDriver. I knew of Selenium but I was never really interested as I needed a pure java headless browser that was lightweight and easy to use.

But after reading more about HtmlUnitDriver I decided to give it a try. Maybe it could fake out this website. How I didn't know as it wasn't doing something too complex, it just needed it to log me into this website.

But what do you know, it worked! How I really don't know? What is HtmlUnitDriver doing differently than HtmlUnit? I really have know clue. I wish there was more documentation. I've looked on the web but there's really not much out there.

Given this, I will now use HtmlUnitDriver if I have trouble as it's as close to a real browser as possible but I really wish someone would explain to me what it's doing that's so different?

Any explanation or additional documentation would be grateful. Otherwise I'm stuck analyzing the code and trying to figure this out on my own. This is tough as my java skills are rusty so any help would be appreciated.

Thank you again.