Hi, this is Vivien.

If you’ve popped into the Dream page recently, you’ll see that Steve has nicely reorganized the whole thing so that configurations, tutorials, specs, and services are easier to locate. For the past month or so I’ve been working on two tutorials that act as a way to show users how to use Dream and the advantages of using Dream.

The tutorials are: Building a Web Scraper with Dream(which uses the Dream library) and Building a Web Scraper without Dream (which uses the .Net libraries).

Experience-wise, making the two tutorials were interesting because of the vast difference in the amount of code and hassle to get the exact same thing setup. I had initially started off building the Web Scraper using the Dream library, it was nice, easy, and everything I needed was right there. Unfortunately, this led me to the assumption that building the Web Scraper without Dream would be equally as smooth. I could not have been more wrong. Building the latter was like pulling teeth as I realized that I had to add in yet another arbitrary class yet another library. The code just seemed to grow exponentially, along with all the extra fiddling around with XSLT just to get HTML conversion working. All in all, the latter was quite annoying to deal with. So, unless you’re getting paid by lines of code, I would definitely recommend using Dream for ease of programming and less code.