I'm interested in web enabling my program.
Here's an example of what I mean.
Suppose I am translating some text and run into an unfamiliar word that I can't find in any of my dictionaries and would like to add a new definition. Of course I could manually access a website using a web browser like IE7 or Firefox, but I'd also like to be able to automate the process of going to a specific site, entering a word to be looked up, and capturing the response and returning it back to my program.
I tried reading the Delphi documentation and immediately get swamped with acronyms like ISAPI, NSAPI, HTTP, HTML, and numerous others, and it all sounds like gibberish to me, despite my long years of programming in numerous languages. Yes, I go way back, was even fluent in Fortran at one time.
I've tried using Telnet to access a website like Google and send over a request to look up some keyword, and I even got back a response, on the screen, but I need to have an example of how one would programmatically access an online service such as Google, or Dictionary.com or some site with foreign language dictionaries. Of course in some cases I can download dictionaries and convert them into my own format, but I'd like to somehow web enable my program to make it do some things automatically, particularly when I encounter unfamiliar place names, geographic names, cities, countries, etc. I'm sure I could implement some sort of method of handling them, if only to flag them as untranslatable words which represent themselves, don't require translation. I'm not sure what I'd do with something like "Tierra del Fuego". Would my program recognize that as a place name or would it blindly translate the words into English (Land of Fire)?
Anyway, I'd love to have some sort of example, preferrably one that isn't too dependent on 3rd party add-ons to Delphi. I have Dephi 3.0 and I suppose I could upgrade to a later version if required, but I like to do things using the basic nuts and bolts, rather than buying solutions already done by someone else, which might not serve my needs as well as something I coded myself. Examples are priceless in this business.
Thanks in advance for any help anyone can offer, suggestions, advice, tips. If you tell me to use C++ I might consider it, but I have been using Delphi for what seems like forever and I have a lot of existing code I don't want to convert.