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I am trying to do some html ajax scraping using watir. But I was just told mechanize is better than watir as mechanize doesn't require a web browser runing while doing the scraping work. Does it sound right? <br />
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I am interested in knowing which is better in terms of functionality, performance, continued community support, and multi-threading. In addition, I would like to know if either of them can work with Java. Can anyone share some thoughts?
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I am trying to do some html ajax scraping using watir. But I was just told mechanize is better than watir as mechanize doesn't require a web browser runing while doing the scraping work. Does it sound right? 

I am interested in knowing which is better in terms of functionality, performance, continued community support, and multi-threading. In addition, I would like to know if either of them can work with Java. Can anyone share some thoughts?

mechanize vs watir

Ruby is an open-source dynamic object-oriented interpreted language that supports multiple programming frameworks including functional, object oriented and imperative. It also has a dynamic type system and automatic memory management. Ruby focuses on simplicity and productivity. Ruby's market share spiked due to Ruby on Rails, a model-view-controller (MVC) framework for building web applications.

Ruby

JavaScript is a dynamic, object-based language commonly used for client-side scripting in web browsers. Recently, server side JavaScript frameworks have also emerged. JavaScript runs on nearly every operating system and  in almost every mainstream web browser.

JavaScript

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is a group of interrelated Web development techniques used on the client-side to create asynchronous Web applications. With AJAX, web applications can send data to and retrieve from a server asynchronously (in the background) without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. HTML and CSS can be used in combination to mark up and style information. The Document Object Model (DOM) is accessed with JavaScript to dynamically display and allow interaction with the information presented.