NAVEGANTE: An intrusive browsing framework

Abstract

NAVEGANTE is a generic framework to build superior order proxies for intrusive browsing. This framework provides the means for developing tools that behave as proxies, but perform some processing task on the content that is being browsed. Parallel to this content processing, applications can also run other user-defined functions with different purposes and interfaces, but we'll explain those later. Currently, NAVEGANTE only builds applications that run as CGIs, but this is intended to change in a near future. Applications are built writing programs in NAVEGANTE's Domain Specific Language (DSL). NAVEGANTE is a work in progress. This article aims to describe the current state of development. What applications can be built and how. Also, we identify some implementation problems, and briefly discuss some future improvements. Finally, we try to illustrate most of the concepts described using a couple of case studies.