Need programming suggestions. What language should I use?

[Ryan Lehms]

I want to create an application that will display a wide variety of severe weather information on a big screen TV. I want all the data to update on its own with zero user input. I imagine a main area in the middle that cycles SPC graphics, radar, etc, and is surrounded by a number of smaller graphics, warning texts, and other data. (I've tried a web based solution already and it's not quite capable of what I'm looking to do.)

I've got 10 years experience in a number of programming languages, but they're all back end. What language should I learn for a project like this and why would you suggest it?

I have a variety of platforms available; Windows, Mac, Linux. Thanks in advance.

 

[David Wolfson]

I think you'd get twenty different answers, and I'm not sure you're asking the right question. I gather by your mentioning you tried a web-based solution that you already tried Javascript, PHP, or somesuch hitting web servers for your graphics. I'm guessing you found that hitting multiple servers was too slow, and I'm guessing you're asking about finding a "faster" language to speed that up.

TTI I think just about any language can handle the tasks easily, provided the graphics you're tiling reside on your local file system. What I think you need to do is to decouple the data display task from the data update tasks, which spend 99% of their time waiting for new data.

Perhaps all you need is to take your web application local with your own Apache web server and multiple scheduled process scripts pulling the updates off remote servers as they become available. For the scripts I think just about any language that handles the file system and web calls at an intelligibly high level should work, even the console language like bash.

One idea to run with is using a VNC client to drive the monitor, with a separate VNC server maintaining the desktop. This way the VNC server machine can be running heterogeneous windows, including browsers, graphics, photos, text, and even video. Right now for example I'm typing on a Win XP laptop downstairs (watching Deadliest Catch ) and I can fully interact with a Linux desktop upstairs via the LAN. FWIW.

 

[Ryan Lehms]

Thanks for the suggestion. I appreciate the fresh perspective. I think you really hit it home with "decouple the data display task from the data update tasks." That's something I hadn't considered before, but would definitely make more sense for this type of application.

I think I'll try something along the lines of using a series of cron jobs to pull the data down and write scripts to parse everything. Then on the front end, use Ajax to keep everything fresh.

I had originally thought people would suggest learning Adobe Flex/ Actionscript, or something similar in nature. I'm still open to those types of ideas, but I'll definitely give this a shot first.

 

[Mike Moore]

I would think Java could handle the task... I guess it depends if this is a one time install, or a program you want to package and sell?

 

[Ryan Lehms]

Java is one of my primary languages. I think for something like this though it would be too much of a resource hog.

I have no intentions of producing something to sell. If anything, I'll open source it.

 

[Ben Holcomb]

Perl or PHP with Javascript would probably produce something worthwhile for this.

 

[Mike Gibson]

I'd go with C# if you're just going to download imagery and text then display it. I believe there's a free Visual Studio C# Express available on microsoft.com.