What technologies/tools do people use to implement live websites ?

Question

Hi,

I have the following situation:

-I have a server A hooked up to a piece of hardware that sends values and information out of every second. Programs on the server machine can read these values. This server A is in a very remote location so Internet connection is very slow and not reliable but the connection does exist. Let's say it's a weather station in the Arctic.

-Users from the home location want to monitorize the weather values somehow. Well, the users can use a remote desktop connection the server A but that would be too too slow.

My idea is somehow to have a website on a web server (let's call the webserver - B and B is in a home location ) and make the server A connect to the server B and somehow send values and the web application reads the values and displays them....... but how to do such a system ?? I know I can use MySQL and have the server A connect to a SQL server on server B and send INSERT queries and have the web application running on server B constantly read from the SQL server but I think that would be way way too slow and I think there has to be a better solution.

Any ideas ?

BTW. The users should be able to send information to the weather station from the website as well ( so an ADMIN user should be allowed to shut down the weather station from the website or whatever)

Best regards, MadSeb

Answer 1

Ganglia (http://ganglia.sourceforge.net/) is a popular monitoring tool that supports collecting arbitrary statistics using the gmetric tool. You might be able to build something around that.

If you do need to roll your own solution then you could have a persistent message queue at A (I'm a fan of RabbitMQ) to which you could log your metrics. You could then have something at B which listens for messages on the queue and saves the state at B.

• This approach means you don't lose data when the connection drops.
• The message might be a simple compressed data value, say csv or json so should be fine on low bandwidth connections.
• All the work (parsing the csv or json, and saving the data to a database for example) is done at B where you don't have limitations.