Automating Web Server Queries when no Local Executable Available

Question

[asdfxzsdf2]

If you find yourself in a situation where you need to make a large number of queries to some web server, and no local executable has been made available, is there a common way to circumvent this?

Answering my own question: a few python libraries exist for this sort of thing, two examples are scrapy and mechanize.

[GenoMax]

Be a good citizen when doing this. Many bioinformatics (related) sites have norms published about how many queries you are allowed to do per unit time using programmatic means.

[WouterDeCoster]

You are rather vague about which web server(s) you want to query, but for some applications it's also possible to download the database for offline use.