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Hey HN! Creator of Automately here. Although there's not much details on the site because we accepting only early access requests right now I can definitely give you a little more details. Developers will be able to write automation scripts and run them. The automation scripts are written in JavaScript using a custom API. You will be able to submit automation jobs via the Automately API. Your job will be submitted to a powerful cluster and ran as fast as possible. You will be able to interact with websites and do many many other things. Stay tuned for more details :)
What would be a few use cases for this?
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There are many things you could do with Automately! You could create new APIs that connect your services to other sites automating lots of things! For example you could create a banking API that connects developers to banking data. You could use Automately to connect to banks that offer online banking!
How is this different from IFTTT [0]?

[0] https://ifttt.com/

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Automately is going to allow developers to write their own automation scripts connecting to websites of their choice. You won't be limited to channels, just your creativity and what you can do.
What's an automation script in this case?
A simple script written in JavaScript. You write code using our automation API interacting with websites making clicks, anything you would normally do as a normal person interacting with a web browser except using JavaScript to do it! And a lot more!
Hi, I guess you can make your messaging more powerful if you add in an example automation code to show an use case.

It looks like a cool idea. All the best.

@mailarchis had a great point :)

Example automation script:

println("Opening Google"); browser.openPage("http://www.google.com"); browser.waitForSelector("[name=q]", 2); browser.getElement("[name=q]").sendKeys("Hello World"); println(browser.getTitle());

It's not much of an example we are accepting early access requests though :) You will definitely get more details on automation scripts.

Please look at selenium webdriver And the webdriver w3c draft API
Selenium of course does provide web automation technology but here at Automately we are trying to do more than that. We are trying to put web automation in the hands of developers as fast as possible and inspire them to create new things.