A more efficient way might be to write a standalone socket server, in some
easy scripting language (php, python, etc), which sits on your server and
monitors the flat file. Since there is no network delay, it can check very
often, once a second or even faster. It will accept conenctions from flash
clients, and when it sees a change in the flat file, it can broadcast it to
the connected clients.

On 1/5/07, Paul Andrews <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Hi,

I'm about to start a new project which will display the workings of a
server based system that's manipulating data and passing it between servers.
At each stage of the process a flat file is written that indicates a change
in status/readiness of the data for the next stage in the process.

My flash project will sit over the top of this indicating what's going on
- driven by the flat file status changes. It's unlikely that I can really
change the infrastructure at all - probably the best I'll be able to do will
be to have the  status files copied into a suitable form for the flash
project to read. It's going to be interesting if I can't meddle with the
infrastructure or get a file format compatible with loadvars or xml..

Since it's unlikely I can add much to the infrastructure, as far as I can
tell the best approach is simply to poll for the presence of the status
files regularly and read them to pick up any changes. I don't know if I'll
be able to expose the files through a web service, or add a socket server.

So my current thinking is to poll (read the status files if they are
there), then sleep for an interval then poll again (this will be as
real-time as I can manage). Effectively I'll be building an event-driven
project that generates events to update the interface in reaction to the
presence of the status files. Unfortunately, without a socket server I can't
push the changes, nor can I reply on other solutions being installed on the
server side (such as media server).

As the status changes, I'll animate the flash interface to show what's
going on on the servers.

Anyone done this kind of thing before and have some sage advice/gotchas?

Paul
--
ipauland.com
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