Re: [bidwatcher-users] Bidwatcher: points for improvement

[Jason B. <ja...@sh...>]

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 16:29:01 +0200, Jan Starzynski wrote
> * using scripting languages like Perl or Phyton. These can be used 
> in two ways: closely connected as libraries or by calling external 
> scripts. Additionally HTML-Parsing modules could be used but these 
> usually add an enormous trail of dependencies (at least in Perl). 
> But possibly the parser could be limited to using Regular 
> Expressions and other standard functionality.

Perl's HTML::Parser has no dependencies other than some standard Perl modules
(Dynaloader, Exporter).
 
> ************* Networking
> I think there should be powerfull libraries out for C++ to handle 
> all the communication over HTTP. Using Perl (with its LWP-module)
>  adds a lot of dependencies that would break the 
> "configure;make;make install" procedure.

If LWP doesn't come standard with Perl now it's probably installed by default
on 99% of the Linux distros out there.

I don't think dependencies should be a determining factor when picking what
tools to program in so long as the dependencies are common and readily
available in the popular package format of the day. 
 

I came across another ebay bidding tool this weekend called BidMonkey. It's
very weak compared to bidwatcher (I hope that will make up for my earlier
unintened insult, Kevin :-) but it does have one interesting feature. It
appears to keep a dictionary of strings or regexps needed to parse eBays pages
in a seperate file. The file can be updated as needed which eliminates the
need for an entirely new version whenever eBay changes. I know something like
this would be easy to implement in Perl or Python, not sure how easy it would
be in C/C++.

--
Jason Bodnar
ja...@sh...
http://www.shakabuku.org

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