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
We have made the decision to create a Java Application which is started through JavaWebStart (so no applet). We are planning to embed mozilla inside the Java app. Kees.
