That’s good to know, I’ll look into that some more. I was thinking that it might be slow if I’m having to scrape each page, every time a user changes categories (or something similar).
Well, it’s as slow as the website you’re scraping. Could actually be faster if you don’t have to execute a lot of bullshit JavaScript. And for the rest clever caching should help.
In terms of technology you’re looking for XSLT, Xpath, CSS selectors and whatever parsers are available for your language of choice. Don’t ever attempt to use regex for scraping.