How Do I approach this....

Dev

An airport wants to have their Flight Information "LIVE" on their site...and I think they want the information taken from their present system. So when they update Flight Info at the airport (Arrivals, Departures, Status - such as Delayed, On Time etc.)...it would automatically be updated on the website.

How do I go about this?

abc123

It would be difficult to say with not knowing about the interface where flight information is updated.

I would be thinking that content would have to be stored in a database. When a transaction is done such as flights cancelled or delayed that it would call a script that will automatically update the information in the database. This would in turn update the content on the website.

I suppose in a way it is a content management system that they need.

Sounds like an interesting project. Hope my thoughts are of help and let us know how you get on.

bradgrafelman

That would depend a great deal on what "system" they use. I have absolutely no knowledge about airports and whatnot, but you might need a MySQL database to store and index the data (assuming you can interface with their "system" to retrieve this data).

The problem comes with the "LIVE" part. You could have a PHP script that runs in the background constantly doing nothing but: polling the "system" for changes, updating the MySQL DB with changes found (if any), sleeping for xx seconds, rinse/lather/repeat.

Roger_Ramjet

The live system should 'push' the updates to the website. How they do that depends on what platform the live system is running on.

The usual problem you will encounter is that the people who develop or maintain that system won't cooperate, won't have a budget for it, and frequently don't have the neccessary skills to implement a robust system, or produce compatible output.

If they are not locked into some legacy system that will take 6 months and cost a fortune to modify then see if they know how to produce an RSS feed in XML that your site would use to auto-update itself. That will future-proof things and have notable benefits down-stream. An RSS feed could, for instance, be made available to agents and customers to keep them up to date on their existing bookings.

I mostly do back office systems and frequently find that the corporate MIS will not co-operate with the business unit I am dealing with. We end up working around them and do things like screen scrape a terminal emulator running under one of the business depts user accounts. You just set it up to continually cycle through the system looking for update to capture. Totally inefficient - but it works.

Dev

I am in the process of finding out which platform/system they use.....

Thanks for the RSS tip....I'll find out about that tyoo and give you a feedback.