How about SOAP?
Graham Heyes wrote:
> Hello,
> I am involved in a project to provide a customizable control system
> for research experiments. The control system controls and moniters
> parameters from physical devices cnnected to embedded processors
> connected to a network. Most of the system has been implemented using
> distributed agents and lots of other fun technology I won't bore you
> with here. The result is that we have a lot of data which updates in
> real time. I have built servlets using apache, tomcat and velocity which
> present a snapshot of the data at any one time. For example you can pull
> up a web page which provides the status (current, voltage etc) for a set
> of power supplies. The problem is that the data is dynamic while HTML,
> once rendered, is static and needs updating either by presing reload or
> using javascript.
> We currently have two working solutions to this display problem. One
> is to do the display in flash which allows us to connect Flash objects
> to the server and update them in real time. The second option is to
> implement the display as a Java applet.
> I am starting to wonder if there is a third, and perhaps neater,
> what of getting an object on a rendered page to update in response to a
> message from the server. This could be either a browser plugin (like
> flash but with feature set under our control rather than macromedia) or
> some protocol already in mozilla that I haven't got as far as reading
> about yet.
> Any suggestions welcome. Again, problem is to have objects on a
> rendered page track real time data stored on the server.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Graham Heyes
>
