I have a project that I'm not sure how to approach, so I thought you guys might have some ideas.
OK, here goes...
I have to plot some data from an MS Access (and in the future, SQL Server) DB on the Internet. The data is simple sales numbers or similar, it just wants showing in bar charts or something.
The trouble is, I don't know the best (/easiest) way to do this.
I'd thought I could just have an
applet that connects with
JDBC to the data source and plots accordingly, but on reading the docs it seems that the JDBC-ODBC bridge is unsuitable cos you have to configure ODBC on the client, have a signed applet, and not all browsers support it.
We could buy a proper JDBC driver, but they seem quite expensive and we'd need a new one when the DB moved from Access to SQL Server.
I could pass all the data as <PARAM>s to the applet, but the page would need reloading when you wanted to view different data (eg. zoom in or scroll through it). This is possible with JavaScript and ASP or similar but it might be a bit messy.
Another way I was thinking of was to have a
Java prog run on the server, drawing the image for the web page to load according to parameters passed from an ASP page or something. I don't think it would be hard to launch an app from an ASP page, but I'm not sure if the web page could be made to wait for the image to be drawn. Perhaps some JavaScript could do this. As the app is on the server, there wouldn't be a problem reding from the DB with JDBC-ODBC. Also the image would have to be saved as a GIF (or JPEG) - is this possible?
The last option would be to buy something that did this already, as an applet or ActiveX control. Anyone know of anything that would do the job?
OK, I think that's about it. Any thoughts?