Here's the situation: I am making an app for a car dealership. This app will include a database of all the cars in their dealership. They have someone who already updates the list on a website when there are new arrivals.

Here's the question: When a new car is added to their stock I will need a way to update the list of cars once every week at least. Which way would be easier in your opinion: pulling the data from the website and formatting it in app; or having a separate program on the server that will format it automatically and have at a specific place for the app to download. So basically format in-app (C,C++) or format on the computer then upload (Java, HTML)?

It depends on how the data is stored. If it's something like an SQL database, it shouldn't be too hard for the client program to do the formatting. If it's something more complex, I think server-side formatting will be better, since C++/C is much faster than Java. I'm not an expert on this, though.

I'm pretty sure it's not an SQL database so I'm gonna go with server side I guess. Which language would I be using for that? C right?

That totally depends on the server. You would most likely have something sitting at the server answering requests for data, then retrieving and formatting the data for use.

No, absolutely not.

What do you mean by "app" anyway? Are you talking a mobile app or something?

Regardless, your app should just make a request to the server which should return a serialized format of whatever you want (JSON should work). The server side should do that in whatever server side language they already have (PHP, Python, Ruby, ASP.NET, or Java are the likely candidates).

Your app can be written in whatever you want, but what language really depends on what platform.

Thanks for the help guys!