In New Zealand they advertise Bluebird potato chips with CGI generated penguins and an song. Those little guys will go to great lengths to get their chippies, but somehow I think their real-life counterparts are content with their usual diet.
I write things like this in C, focusing mainly on NNTP and E-mail. After you've developed all the libraries you need once, it becomes quick to impelment new systems based on the same code. I would imagine the task would be somewhat simpler with PHP, due to the amount of 'stuff' that comes with it, but the complexity of the core code would be similar due to PHP being very similar to C.
For pulling data from Web sites, for use when testing, I would typically use Wget (Win32) and parse it with findstr using a batch file. Doesn't get much simpler than that.
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In New Zealand they advertise Bluebird potato chips with CGI generated penguins and an song. Those little guys will go to great lengths to get their chippies, but somehow I think their real-life counterparts are content with their usual diet.
I write things like this in C, focusing mainly on NNTP and E-mail. After you've developed all the libraries you need once, it becomes quick to impelment new systems based on the same code. I would imagine the task would be somewhat simpler with PHP, due to the amount of 'stuff' that comes with it, but the complexity of the core code would be similar due to PHP being very similar to C.
For pulling data from Web sites, for use when testing, I would typically use Wget (Win32) and parse it with findstr using a batch file. Doesn't get much simpler than that.