Advice needed for application development approach

[newman]

Hi,

I need a general advice on developing an application for a Ubuntu Touch panel computer.

The application I am making will communicate with external hardware via serial port, using the 5dpo component. It is a machine control based application. The application will be run at startup of the computer.

The application basically monitors the port and controls the hardware connected to it. Users will interact using the program via a form. Users can configure, control the hardware connected. The application will also have a database (sqlite based) that keeps data for various parameters.

I have thought of two different approaches to the application, the first is the usual style of having an application that controls the hardware and also manages the user interface via ListView, buttons tables etc via form(s).

The second approach is to have a back end application (lazarus based) that interacts with the hardware via the serial port. This application runs in the background and is not visible to the user. It will handle all serial port related tasks.

A PHP based web page running from a web server on the same PC will interact with the back end application and will also handle the sqlite database.

So basically  I have PHP based front end, a back end that consists of a lazarus application and the web-server. Please remember both back-end and web-server are running on the same PC, internet will not be available.

The second approach looks favourable because it is quite easy to generate tables / page styling etc. with HTML, PHP and ajax. User is also more familiar with this as it is web based. Development and coding could also be easier.

The first approach has the advantage that only a single application needs to be maintained, so I just have monitor a single application, this will also reduce complexity of code.

Please remember the application would be running almost continuously and as hangups/application crashes are un-acceptable I will also be providing a backup, recovery and monitoring application that will check the general health of the applications and re-start any application that fails.

Please advise which style could be suitable ??

thanks
a

[taazz]

well on one hand you have a simple but painful to code single application that handles the hardware and the database and on the other hand you have a cgi application a web server and a webbrowser working together to handle the hardware and the database. What do you think will have less memory and processor requirements on the running Tablet? keep in mind that tablets are usually less powerful than pcs.

[newman]

The web-server approach may consume memory. But using a light weight server like the lighttpd could reduce the consumption. Also since there is only connection to the server it should not consume much memory.

thanks
nm