What options are available for receiving instant alerts from web applications?
I have a time sensitive web application I need to tend to (approving expediated purchase order requests). I have thought of being notified by e-mail and SMS.
Are there any programs to let my website send a popup window directly to my screen? Or any other instant notification options?
I don't know of any. You could write a desktop app that constantly polls the database the requests are stored in and pop up a notification. Otherwise, use email or SMS (find the email address for your phone that will send it an SMS, this varies by provider)
You could always have it send messages via Jabber (or whatever IM network you choose).
If you have your application open and you want a popup to appear, you could have a javascript timer that does an ajax style poll of your server every so often to see if there is a notification it needs to post. You could then throw up a pop up with the notification?
You could also have an RSS feed tying into the application that would publish an update as soon as something occurred. Granted that would require you to have an RSS reader constantly pinging the application.
Similarly, if you use the log4j/log4net framework, you can log a "fatal" or other special event for these actions and configure the appender to notify you via SMS, e-mail, etc.
...ooh, come to think of it. If you are using a .NET based app, log4net has a NetSendAppender that "Writes logging events to the Windows Messenger service. These messages are displayed in a dialog on a users terminal."
The question isn't really specific enough to answer. From a high level point of view, presumably this notification would be sent from the server process and not client side via JavaScript. Without knowing the server side development language I can't say what specific libraries might be available, however there is the PhpTocLib PHP library available on SourceForge although I'm not sure how current that is.
Another option would be to sign up for twitter or a similar service and send yourself a direct message when you have an update of interest. This could be accomplished with a simple HTTP POST from your application and you could receive notification using whatever methods the various microblogging services offer, including SMS.
Include instant messenger fields in your account details. When your application processes an expedited order, stick the notification in a queue. If their instant messenger field is blank, prompt them. Write an XMPP (Jabber) bot that consumes items in that queue and send them out. Use transports to enable functionality for other networks, for MSN Messenger users, etc.