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I'm searching for a suitable way to make web requests to databases and display results in real-time. The data will be used in an interface for staff, so there cannot be any blocking or lag as time is a key factor.

So far, I've been using PHP for the backend of the system. However now that I've come to the interface, I'm slightly stuck.

I've used java (android) asynchronously before, and ideally am after a similar method of processing calls. From what I've read there is no current way of using php truly asynchronously.

What is a good web language to use for this purpose? or what are my available options?

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closed as off-topic by Bart van Ingen Schenau, MichaelT, Jim G., GlenH7, maple_shaft♦ Jul 20 '14 at 11:14

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what do you mean by "real-time". Real time is one concept (processing cannot take longer than x time), "non-blocking-ui" processing is a different one –  SJuan76 Jul 19 '14 at 11:36

1 Answer 1

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As commented, you probably don't mean strong real-time computing!

Assuming you mean HTML5 you could use Ajax techniques (then Jquery could help) to periodically (e.g. every 10 seconds) query some web server (that web server could itself query some database) from inside the browser.

HTTP itself is synchronous: each HTTP request gets one answer.

There is also webservices and websockets

Several languages and frameworks support all this quite well: not only PHP but also Opa or Ocaml with Ocsigen, or HOP. You could also code in C, C++ or in Java with some good HTTP server library like libonion (of course some Javascript code is needed on the browser side)

Your question is too broad to get a more precise answer. It seems that you need to learn more about web technologies. w3schools is not perfect, but has several tutorials and you could find many others (e.g. some HTML-5 tutorial...)

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okay, thank you for you answer –  Simon. Jul 19 '14 at 11:48

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