Programming Spiders, Bots and Aggregators in Java

Spiders, bots, and aggregators are all so-called intelligent agents, which execute tasks on the Web without the intervention of a human being.

Spiders go out on the Web and identify multiple sites with information on a chosen topic and retrieve the information.

Bots find information within one site by cataloging and retrieving it.

Aggregrators gather data from multiple sites and consolidate it on one page, such as credit card, bank account, and investment account data.

As the Web grows more complex, there will be more and more applications of intelligent agents; Java is expected to be one of the principal languages used to build these agents.