I have a quite nice front end for the new program and I can do all sorts of good things from the desktop but it's slow and it holds up the computer while it does things, as you would expect.

What I didn't expect is that some things are so slow that they can actually time out and that's a problem for an automated tool.

I examined the potential of Python to be a cgi program and it can, very nicely as it turns out BUT.

I found that I cannot guarantee that the end user will have Python installed on their host computer.  Even if they do there is always the issue of which version is installed.

Back to the search for a cross platform solution which I can almost 100% guarantee will be on whatever hosting platform my potential client is using.

It came down to this...what is WordPress using?  Since this is to be a WordPress tool it does make sense that if I use the same languages that WordPress is using then they must have that installed on their host.

There is still an issue of versions but that can be addressed much more easily from the WordPress forum because they will be having the same issues with their blog installation.

So there you have it.  Python on the desktop and a combination of perl and php on the remote site.  I do have to check for versions and modify the code slightly to accommodate the variations but they are well known and there is lots of help in forums and the main sites for these issues.

Now if only I can get about 3 weeks of totally uninterrupted time to complete this I should have it all done by July.  Can't actually see that uninterrupted time in big enough blocks but I will hammer away at it until it's complete in any case.