dataflowkitvskimurai
Dataflow kit ("DFK") is a Web Scraping framework for Gophers. It extracts data from web pages, following the specified CSS Selectors. You can use it in many ways for data mining, data processing or archiving.
Web-scraping pipeline consists of 3 general components:
- Downloading an HTML web-page. (Fetch Service)
- Parsing an HTML page and retrieving data we're interested in (Parse Service)
- Encoding parsed data to CSV, MS Excel, JSON, JSON Lines or XML format.
For fetching dataflowkit has several types of page fetchers:
- Base fetcher uses standard golang http client to fetch pages as is. It works faster than Chrome fetcher. But Base fetcher cannot render dynamic javascript driven web pages.
- Chrome fetcher is intended for rendering dynamic javascript based content. It sends requests to Chrome running in headless mode.
For parsing dataflowkit extracts data from downloaded web page following the rules listed in configuration JSON file. Extracted data is returned in CSV, MS Excel, JSON or XML format.
Some dataflowkit features:
- Scraping of JavaScript generated pages;
- Data extraction from paginated websites;
- Processing infinite scrolled pages.
- Sсraping of websites behind login form;
- Cookies and sessions handling;
- Following links and detailed pages processing;
- Managing delays between requests per domain;
- Following robots.txt directives;
- Saving intermediate data in Diskv or Mongodb. Storage interface is flexible enough to add more storage types easily;
- Encode results to CSV, MS Excel, JSON(Lines), XML formats;
- Dataflow kit is fast. It takes about 4-6 seconds to fetch and then parse 50 pages.
- Dataflow kit is suitable to process quite large volumes of data. Our tests show the time needed to parse appr. 4 millions of pages is about 7 hours.
Kimurai is a modern web scraping framework for Ruby, inspired by Python's Scrapy. It provides a structured approach to building web scrapers with built-in support for multiple browser engines, session management, and data pipelines.
Key features include:
- Multiple engine support Can use different backends depending on the scraping needs: Mechanize for simple HTTP requests, Selenium with headless Chrome/Firefox for JavaScript-rendered pages, and Poltergeist (PhantomJS) for lightweight rendering.
- Scrapy-like architecture Follows the spider pattern: define a spider class with start URLs and parsing methods, and the framework handles crawling, scheduling, and data collection.
- Built-in data pipelines Save scraped data to JSON, CSV, or custom formats with configurable output pipelines.
- Session management Maintains browser sessions with automatic cookie handling and configurable delays between requests.
- Request scheduling Built-in request queue with configurable concurrency, delays, and retry logic.
- CLI tools Command-line tools for generating new spiders, running individual spiders, and managing scraping projects.
Kimurai is the closest Ruby equivalent to Scrapy. It's well-suited for structured scraping projects that need organization, multiple spiders, and data pipeline processing.
Note: Kimurai has not seen active development recently, but it remains a useful framework for Ruby scraping projects and is included as the most complete Ruby scraping framework available.