Re: Adding a realtime monitoring console

Kelly, > The most appealing method (in my mind) is to develop a socket protocol > that allows the application to communicate with the console. The drawback > here seems to be that the console will not usually be active, and I'm > concerned that attempting to establish a connection will impose too much > overhead since most often there will be nothing listening. How about using the event-listener pattern? When the console starts and stops it will register and unregister with the application. The application will only send events to registered listeners (actively running consoles). > The most viable solution I can dream up is writing events to a log file, > and have the console (basically) "tail -f" that file to watch the online > activity. The added value of this approach is a log file can be archived > easily or analyzed offline without the need for a database. Potential > drawbacks include the overhead of file I/O and file locking, etc. Logging may be something you'll want to do regardless of the communication model. Eric