Overview
In systems-to-systems integrations, there comes an inevitable time when we have to employ some kind of web scraping tool to integrate with a particular application. Despite its not being our first choice, it is good to know what to use at such a time - in this article, I provide a gentle introduction to my favourite tool of this kind, called Playwright, followed by sample Python code that integrates it with an API service.
Naturally, in the context of backend integrations, web scraping should be avoided and, generally, it should be considered the last resort. The basic issue here is that while the UI term contains the “interface” part, it is not really the “Application Programming” Interface that we would like to have.