So I decided on a small project for myself: GUI automation and web scrapper/screen scrapper

All the program will need to do is read the state of the screen to determine what it needs to do next. The web scrapper will be the last inclusion. So coming from using a lot of java recently, I looked at my options for writing this and came up with:

Sikuli
AutoIT script
Java's Robot class
...learn c++

It's intended to be a short and sweet project that maybe can be built on, so I didn't want to learn c++
Autoit seems like the simplest way to go about it, but I'd prefer to get practice in python / Jython or whatever else as opposed to this

Reasonable or?

Python, scrapy, and, selenium

Thanks, I'll check it out.

If you're on Mac you could wrap Python around the system JavaScript or applescript, which would work similarly to windows autoit

Here is the library I was thinking of, https://github.com/jacexh/pyautoit

python and scrapy sound great. I was learning python before java

i thought you could scrape the web with just php. but what do you mean exactly when you say "web scraper"