NetQL: Web Automation Framework

Hey HN, We've been quietly building a powerful new way to automate much of the web in a more modern fashion. After many years of operating and using other scraping tools, what we really wanted was a "one-stop shop" to write, run and watch what was going on with the browser. Not a local one, mind-you, but the actual browser that will be responsible for running this kind of programmatic traffic.

This led us to pioneer a new way of thinking about and automating web platforms. Having had success in prior API designs with technologies like GraphQL, we began to wonder if it might be a good fit for browser automation. Having inline documentation, history, and typings built into the API was a nice leap forward. The fact that mutations are executed in series also lent itself well to a majority of the web automation use-cases. This means you're also not tied to any particular language or framework and can leverage the full capabilities of the service.

So! Today we wanted to show a bit of taste as to what this looks like. You get an amazing "batteries-included" toolset out of the box with: documentation, history, variables, tabs as well as a live debugger to see what the browser is doing when it's being ran. All while being backed and powered by well set up automation stack that has all the other pieces you might need or want. It's also stateful by design, meaning you can come back to a prior session and continue where you left off which is a great fit for things like AI agents.

This is the future of web automation as we see it, thanks for taking a look!

https://netql.dev