Desktop widget for Windows and Ubuntu?

Question

Hi everybody,

I am looking for some kind of solution of building some kind of desktop widget for Windows, Ubuntu + Apples OS in a latter stage.

What I want it to do is to make a HTTP request once per hour from a PHP page at my web server and display the value to the users desktop.

What would be a good way to accomplish something like that?

Answer 1

For the server side, these day most people would use a web service. You can write one in any language of choice and host it on a webserver.

You will need to choose a cross platform library that will allow you to write the widget and use the web service. You could go with wxWidgets, QT, Java or .NET (with Mono).

You did not provide details on what development environment and language/s and frameworks you would like to use, so I can't really be more detailed.

Edit:

In PHP, you can simply serve up the data/value you want to display on your widget.

If this is all you do, then in the widget you will need to use an http library to retrieve the value from the PHP page for display.