Hey all,<br />your thoughts will be read in total, carefully considered & greatly appreciated.<br /><br />There is alot of '<i>mine is better than yours</i>' kind of fruitless arguments that go on in computing & associated disciplines & markets.<br />Infamous platform, console, text interface text-editors (vi & emacs User's Reunion anyone? : / ) & pretty much any other front you would care to create by dividing distinct users of technologies that aim to solve one problem/meet a common requirement, come to mind.<br /><br />I mention this because it is not difficult to foresee that my question may instigate the kind of visceral emotive response.<br /><br />You see I am very eager to develop some software that will allow me to interface with websites, be they dynamic or static, but I guess dynamic will be what defines most of the functionality of this tool.<br /><br />Think about any website that it is interesting to work with or that you may need to access to get something done, be it by searching, uploading, or simply going to one page & download the data to add to a local database...<br />I would end up with a lot of text, & image info downloaded from these webpages sometimes.<br />I would like to store this in some database which is exhaustively cross-referenced.<br /><br />That would be my eventual goal.<br /><br />Since I am presently very rusty when it comes to developing I would like to begin just by coding some software that allows me to open a file manipulate text & then pass this text to a browser or the OS.<br />At that point I would like to use the text to set some options in the browser & then head to a site.<br />Pass a URL to the browser & test for the result of what is on the page.<br />I would then like to download from the page an image & a file.<br /><br />On that basis - taking into account that I have used 5 langs & know 2 very, very thoroughly (Pascal, basic -various versions) - what would you pros recommend I use to develop this:<br /><br />1. In terms of efficiency (i.e. size of executable & libraries & their resource use).<br /><br />2. In terms of developement economy (which would lead to least developement time for a robust result).<br /><br />3. Which would achieve a happy medium in terms of best of both (1 & 2) above?<br /><br />4. If necessary which editor would you recommend I buy to work with that language?<br /><br />Thanks. <img src="http://static.dreamincode.net/forums/style_emoticons/default/cool.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="B)" border="0" alt="cool.gif" />
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