[rutthenut]

Going way back in time, well before www and soap, I recall having to develop an application that would talk to another system using serial comms, effectively pretending to be a VT52-type terminal. Had to send commands, verify responses, send subsequent commands based on available options, etc. That was used to integrate between two different types of Telco exchange equipment, for provisioning of X25 circuits on the national network in the UK. Supplier of the kit did not have any form of API, just a terminal-level application, so client-side code had to pretend to be an operator. Ahh, those old days, using green-screen terminals, eh

[ajsnigrutin]

Been there, done that.... even to hack an old ciscos into a bodged-up production/testing enviroment (take config from production, change two addresses from production to testing values, and apply the whole config to a testing cisco).

The good thing with ciscos and most of the old technology is, that once you write that script, it works for years... commands never change, outputs never change, some perl, a regex or five, and you're done.

Doing the same with a webpage, where it's "pride month" today, "womens day" tomorrow, "day against aids" the day after, and each means a new div, a new popup, a new redirect, a backend update inbetween, to make the new banner possible, etc., is a pain in the ass.