What is Araneae?
Araneae is an open-source web crawling framework written in Java. It provides a flexible architecture that makes it easy for developers to create customized web crawlers for gathering data from websites.
Some key features of Araneae include:
- Plugin architecture - Developers can create plugins for adding functionality like parsing, data extraction, and storage.
- Multi-threaded - Crawlers can utilize multiple threads for faster crawling.
- Resumable crawling - If the crawler is stopped, it can resume from where it left off.
- Flexible configuration - Various crawling parameters like politeness, caching, etc. can be configured.
- Built-in components - Comes with reusable components for common functions like HTTP client, frontier management, etc.
Araneae is useful for developers looking to gather large datasets from websites without needing to build a crawler from scratch. Its plugin architecture makes it adaptable to many different use cases. Typical applications include building price comparison sites, market research tools, search engine crawlers, and archiving sites.