Web Application IPC/RPC with Client Applications

Question

Background

I'm at the planning stages of a DIY project that'll help me automate some hardware at my house. It's probably also worthwhile to mention that I've got almost no experience with web-related development.

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The Basics

http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/4706/drawingo.png -- I can't seem to embed the diagram.

• In order to simplify management, I want to implement my UI in the browser.
• The meat of my application will reside inside a Windows service or Linux daemon; this does not mean, however, that I'm after a cross-platform solution -- I'm not tied to any particular platform, so I'll pick one (probably based on the responses that I get) and stick with it.
• I would prefer to use "free" tools (e.g., LAMP/WAMP), but it's not a deal breaker.
• It would be nice to be able to communicate back to the user that some action is in progress (I think AJAX would be one way to go?)

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Questions

The only thing that's not entirely clear to me is the implementation of step № 3. I'd like to hear possible implementation ideas (on Windows or Linux) as to how this should be done. Hopefully some of you can share how this sort of thing is done in the real world.

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Miscellaneous

As always, if there's a problem with my thinking, please point it out!

Answer 1

There are many people better qualified to help with step 3 so I'll leave that to them.

My question is whether is you are looking forward to learning the mess of web technologies required for the front end or consider it a necessary evil on the way to what you really want to accomplish? If the latter (and assuming you are working in C/C++) consider taking a look at WT. It's a toolkit that makes the developing the web interface seem more like a desktop gui while handling much of the ugliness for you. It could potentially cut a lot of time off your development.