Is JAVA the right language?

[EDENO]

Hello!

I have spent several hours learning the basics of JAVA...my goal is to be able to write a program that will access a certain website & check for certain information...so far, I have only been learning to write simple graphics programs and games...nothing I have found so far in JAVA talks about how to write a program that will access a specific website.

I am new to programming in any language...I need to write a program that accesses a web site (like a hotel website), logs in, and checks for availability during a certain day...and if it finds that date not available, I want the program to keep checking the website several times a day and if/when it finally finds that date to be available I want the program to send me an email to alert me.

Is it possible to write a program in JAVA that will do this?

I just don't want to waste alot of time learning something that can't eventually do what I want...Does anyone know how I can learn the type of JAVA programming I am trying to accomplish without first learning all the simple programs (like graphics programs I am not going to be using)...I am desperate, would be very grateful for any responses....please point me in the right direction! THANK YOU!

PS my computer skills are above average, I do understand the JAVA tutorials I have read, and I have written a few simple programs...I want to learn and I will put in the hours, but I am having trouble finding web-based tutorials that go beyond the simplest programs...is buying a book the only answer? I would like to continue learning online...Thanks again!

[mtv134]

you need to learn Java 2 Enterprise Edition and also you need to know how the target website retrieves its data from the database (Webservice) for example
otherwise I don't think it will be possible to do what u r looking for with any programming language

[carlodelmundo]

You can accomplish this with PHP/MYSQL. First--it's open-source and it's made to cater web applications.

An excellent book is "PHP and MySQL Web Development" by Luke Welling and Laura Thompson.

Carlo

[Norm]

..I need to write a program that accesses a web site (like a hotel website), logs in, and checks for availability during a certain day...and if it finds that date not available, I want the program to keep checking the website several times a day and if/when it finally finds that date to be available I want the program to send me an email to alert me.

You can probably do that in java(pretty sure for http, not so sure for https). It would require scanning/parsing the HTML to find the form, creating a response to the action item in the form, reading/parsing the HTML response and continuing until you find what you're looking for. If the responses could vary from day to day, this could involve a lot of code to test for all the possiblities and combinations. Could be tough programming for a beginner.
The sending of email would be the easy part.