WARNING: Do not do the following, for it's horrible design!
I wrote the following application design in my sophmore year of college (97)... I wrote a vb app that would periodically download a web page. I then launched a c++ program that would parse out meaningfull fields, and then using a 'text file' as a database. I would email (via yet another windows executable) various users the information from the file. I then wrote a simple perl program that would append 'to be processed' information to a file, that the vb script would read and update the database, which users could update from a web page. (Perl only handles the last step. Of course, perl could've done the whole thing...) (/me Shudders at the terrible design.) Surprisingly, it never went into production...