Hello everybody!!!
I hope you all have a nice day.
I want to write a web service that would check some web page HTML code every 20 minutes and e-mail it to my mail box. Here I was given a suggestion to use Google App Engine for this task. Having briefly read through that site I learned that two languages could be used there: Java and Python.
Which one do you think would fit best for my task and, therefore, I would have to start learning? (I don't know either language).
Both the languages and their App Engine implementations are pretty solid and mature. As a language, Python is faster to learn, but Java comes with richer tools such as Eclipse that may partly compensate. A lot depends on what other languages you have background in -- for example, coming from C#, Java would be simpler than for somebody coming from, say, C. For such a simple task, the issues of power of the two languages and additional libraries &c doesn't really come into play.
I've tried both languages with GAE and here's my general feeling about the choice of language for it:
Python is generally simpler. So, if you're using bare GAE API, Python's one is simpler to learn and simpler to write a webapp in it.
Java is more compatible. Python's API is generally GAE-specific, while Java API resembles some standard Java technologies (servlets, JDO, deployment etc.)
So, Java is a good choice if you either have an experience with web development in Java or if you're going to use third-party libraries extensively. Otherwise, Python is better.
For your particular task, I'd suggest Python, mostly because of the existence of Beautiful Soup, an excellent HTML parser that handles poorly formed documents.