I don't normally get too deep into programming and need some advise on a graphics program I'm trying to create. I have a program that is monitoring the location of multiple vehicles and displaying their location on a map. In my current plan I'll have three layers of information - a jpeg image for the map, a drawing with multiple colored polygons representing various buildings, and a third layer that is opaque where I'll draw in images of vehicles based on their locations. I decided to make this web based so it will be accessable from pretty much anyplace. My first question is: What technology should I employ to accomplish this? My thoughts are to use an
applet that loads the first 2 layers up and then leaves them as is. The third layer will then retrieve data on a fixed interval and repaint the vehicle locations. Is this a reasonable approach? If so,does anyone happen to have the base code to implement this with. I've been floundering in various forums reading about graphics2d, applets, japplets, mediatracker, and on and on. I want to start with an index.html with a subdirectory called 'images' relative to the index.html. The various images will then be in the images directory. I want to then load these 3 layers and update/repaint the third level on a regular basis from within an applet. Sample code that would work is very much appreciated. A second approach I've considered is to handle all the updating on the server side. I would create all the graphics and then convert the graphics to an image and simply load the image on the browser side. There are multiple details in both of these approaches that are still not fully baked - so any opinions/ideas/pitfalls are much appreciated. I would also entertain possibly paying for fully operational and debugged code for this providing final ownership of the code is mine to do with as I please.
Thanks
Tom