Best tools for making a spider?

[Evan Leibovitch]

This isn't meant to start a flamewar, honestly.

I'm just wondering if there are some languages that are either optimized 
or otherwise more suitable than others for the specific task of writing 
a specialized web spider.

So far the people I've spoken to say this is a perfect task for Ruby, 
but I don't know it at all. There is no previous baggage on this 
particular project so we can choose any tool we want -- but once chosen 
I'd like to stay with it. Having some existing open source templates or 
existing code to build upon is always nice too.

I'm not going to be the programmer (we do want working code, after all 
:-) ) but I do have some say in the tech to be used. Any suggestions or 
pointers of where to explore this particular question are appreciated.

- Evan
 
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