Asset tracking in "real-time" - how best to display in browser?

Question

I am developing an asset tracking system, standard LAMP, and now am wondering how best to present the data to the user in the browser.

I expect to track and most a few thousand items, and to refresh them every second or so. I want to draw a floorplan or map of the area and represent the assets the assets symbolically on that (with different symbols for different classes of assets).

Additionally, the user should be able to click on an asset to interact with it, and search for a particular asset and centre the screen on it, draw a circle round it, etc

http://graphite.wikidot.com/ Looks good - is there any alternative?

At its simplest, I suppose I could just generate a JPEG and display it, using CSS to let me know if/where a user clicks ...

but what's the "best" way to do it?

Answer 1

don't know if it's the 'best' way, but processing.js or protovis should be able to do the visualization part.