[jharrison]

I used Mechanize and Hpricot on a project recently to create a sort of poor-man's API. My client is a performing arts organization that wanted a new website but they already had a (dreadful) internally-hosted site for selling tickets.

In order to keep website users from having 2 accounts I created an interface that scrapes the sign in, sign up, lost password, change password, and couple other screens of the internal system. So when users come to the website and "login" they're actually logging in to the internal system and I just record their session from the internal system so I can masquerade as them as they go about their business.

It's not going to support 100s of connections per second but it gets the job done for their traffic levels (36,000 views the first day of launch).