Clojure and the Firefox Zombie

Since it's Halloween, I thought it might be fun to use Clojure to turn Firefox into a mindless zombie, slavishly obeying my every command. Muahahaha.

I'm too lazy to do the heavy lifting myself, so I'll just steal the functionality I need from the Selenium Web Driver. Part of the pom.xml file looks like this:

<dependencies>
   <dependency>
       <groupId>org.seleniumhq.selenium</groupId>
       <artifactId>selenium-java</artifactId>
       <version>2.9.0</version>
   </dependency>
</dependencies>

From this I can easily create a project.clj file with lein new.

(defproject salty "1.0.0-SNAPSHOT"
  :description "FIXME: write description"
  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.2.1"]
                 [org.seleniumhq.selenium/selenium-java "2.11.0"]])

;; Google tells me the latest version is 2.11.0, not 2.9.0

Now for a lein deps...

Awesome, all my selenium jars downloaded. I'm using Emacs with swank-clojure installed, so I can just hit M-x clojure-jack-in and start playing around. Let me see if I can do the sample project from the Selenium tutorial.

The Java code starts off like this:

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.ExpectedCondition;
import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.WebDriverWait;

Ok, that's easy enough:

user> (import '[org.openqa.selenium By WebDriver])
org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver
user> (import '[org.openqa.selenium WebElement])
org.openqa.selenium.WebElement
user> (import 'org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver)
org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver
user> (import '[org.openqa.selenium.support.ui ExpectedCondition WebDriverWait])
org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.WebDriverWait

Yeah, I wimped out a little--Java interop isn't my strong suit, so I did it a bit at a time in case I screwed things up. So what's next? Well, the tutorial code, stripped of all the comments and OOP stuff, looks like this:

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
driver.get("http://www.google.com");
WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.name("q"));
element.sendKeys("Cheese!");
element.submit();
System.out.println("Page title is: " + driver.getTitle());
        

According to the accompanying text, that should open up Firefox, command it to go to Google, and search for cheese. I'm not hungry, so I'll search for clojure instead.

user> (def driver (FirefoxDriver.))
#'user/driver

Awesome, that just launched Firefox. It's sitting there waiting to do my nefarious bidding.

user> (.get driver "http://www.google.com/")
nil

Muahaha, it opened up Google! World domination, here I come!

user> (def elem (.findElement driver (By/name "q")))
#'user/elem
user> (.sendKeys elem "Clojure")
; Evaluation aborted.

Oops, that didn't work. Can't I just send a straight string?

user> elem
#<FirefoxWebElement org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxWebElement@a04e5eb2>

My elem looks ok, maybe it's some variation on the syntax? Or maybe I need a type hint?

user> (.sendKeys ^WebElement elem "Clojure")
; Evaluation aborted.

Interesting. Now the stack trace is complaining about "Can't convert LCharacter to LCharacterSeq" or some such. Let's try a few more variations...

user> (.sendKeys ^WebElement elem (into-array "Clojure"))
; Evaluation aborted.
user> (.sendKeys ^WebElement elem ["Clojure"])
; Evaluation aborted.
user> (.sendKeys ^WebElement elem (into-array ["Clojure"]))
nil

Aha, that's the trick! My browser types in "Clojure" in the search box.

user> (.submit elem)
nil

Odd, nothing happened. Once the sendKeys method executed, the search box popped up an autocomplete menu, and it's just sitting there. Wait, I know!

user> (.sendKeys ^WebElement elem (into-array ["\n"]))
nil
user> (.submit elem)
nil

There we go. The autocomplete menu responded to the <newline> by going away, and then the submit() function actually submitted the search form, and Google searched for Clojure for me. One last test from the tutorial:

user> (.getTitle driver)
"clojure - Google Search"

It's aliiiiive! I hope you all have a happy halloween. I know I'm going to. Muahaha.