What is the best method to scrape a dynamic website where most of the content is generated by what appears to be ajax requests? I have previous experience with a Mechanize, BeautifulSoup, and python combo, but I am up for something new.
--Edit-- For more detail: I'm trying to scrape the CNN primary database. There is a wealth of information there, but there doesn't appear to be an api.
Selenium IDE, a tool for testing, is something I've used for a lot of screen-scraping. There are a few things it doesn't handle well (Javascript window.alert() and popup windows in general), but it does its work on a page by actually triggering the click events and typing into the text boxes. Because the IDE portion runs in Firefox, you don't have to do all of the management of sessions, etc. as Firefox takes care of it. The IDE records and plays tests back.
It also exports C#, PHP, Java, etc. code to build compiled tests/scrapers that are executed on the Selenium server. I've done that for more than a few of my Selenium scripts, which makes things like storing the scraped data in a database much easier.
Scripts are fairly simple to write and alter, being made up of things like ("clickAndWait","submitButton"). Worth a look given what you're describing.