Programming Advice

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Originally Posted by Michael

I can do basic programming and I have knowledge of programming languages

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Good-oh, so the rest should be easy - now all you have to do is pick a language, learn it, then write your application in it. Writing something is easily the best way to learn, anyway.

I think you're looking for an application that runs locally on a user's PC and presents a web-based interface, i.e. something that runs its own small web server. I'd use Python for that (you can write a web server in about 3 lines of code). Bear in mind that anything that communicates with another PC is going to have to have network access, which these days generally mean it has to use HTTP over port 80 as that's about all that will get through the average firewall.

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David Hicks

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Well, if you want it to work on anything other than IE you really want to avoid ActiveX and if you want to support platforms other than Windows then you definitely don't want ActiveX.

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Is there such thing as a universal 'Active X' equivalent for all browsers?

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or that you want your app to be able to query search engines

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That's it, you got it. Not just search engines, but maybe other popular sites too.

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On the subject of advertising, I can understand that you don't necessarily want Google to take money from you but are you just re-inventing the wheel for the sake of it?

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It is a valid point you've made there, however the problem is Google don't quite advertise or promote in the way that I want to. I have had previous experience with Google Adwords and to be honest, the return is really poor.

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Originally Posted by Michael

Is there such thing as a universal 'Active X' equivalent for all browsers?

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Java? Flash?

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Good-oh, so the rest should be easy - now all you have to do is pick a language, learn it, then write your application in it. Writing something is easily the best way to learn, anyway.

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I don't think I have the patience or intelligence to learn a programming language fully. I speak English and French and that's hard going as it is!

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I think you're looking for an application that runs locally on a user's PC and presents a web-based interface, i.e. something that runs its own small web server. I'd use Python for that (you can write a web server in about 3 lines of code).

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Very similar technologies are McAfee's Safe Search or AVG's Safe Search. It reads the webpage and outputs information. Some information on more popular websites would be available from the database and other information could be read/created dynamically such as using keywords for example.

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Originally Posted by Michael

Is there such thing as a universal 'Active X' equivalent for all browsers?

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What is it that you want to do from inside a browser? If you're distributing code to client machines anyway you can write whatever code you like to figure out whatever you like and present it as a web page. Unless you require some stunningly advanced user interface components you should be able to use standard HTML, maybe with some bits of AJAX thrown in.

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That's it, you got it. Not just search engines, but maybe other popular sites too.

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Pick a language with a decent screen-scraping library that can help you strip the information you want from an HTML page.

If I understand correctly, MS Silverlight is basically a version of the .Net runtime that can be embedded inside a web browser, which might be the kind of thing you're looking for. Java applets, of course, pre-date that by about a decade.

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David Hicks