server sent events - One client to update them all

186 Views Asked by At

Alright, so here is what I am trying to achieve. I have a custom built Point of Sale done in VB.net. What I want to add now is a customer facing android tablet that shows the reciept as it's entered into the Point of Sale.

Brainstorming how to do this I came up with the idea to use a php hosted script (no problem as the POS has a mysql-php web backend on a local server) that would use server sent events to update the tablet. The issue I'm facing is I'm not sure how to update the server (and thus the tablet) from another client (this one being the Point of Sale).

I can't seem to find any examples other than clocks for server sent events, does anyone have a link to something similar or perhaps a better solution than what I came up with?

I had considered using an app like idisplay and just extending that way, but it doesn't support windows 8 which is what the POS is running. I also considered websockets, but I don't have a firm enough grasp of that to get it up and running. I could make an app for the tablet, but I don't really want to do that, most of my background with app development is on iOS and I don't personally like java as a development language.

EDIT 1: Alright, so I'm understanding better how I would need to make this work.

So far I have it working where I can input a $_GET variable to change the value and the next time an update is pushed it works properly. I just need to verify there's new or different data before it pushes the data. Is there a better example than this http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/eventsource/basics/ concerning how to push updates on demand to the listening clients?

0

There are 0 best solutions below