Ok, now we're getting a bit more involved with this than I had at first guessed...one thing I might suggest, if you'd like, is that we take parts of this conversation to a different medium (these forums are excellent for less involved tasks, but phone calls & webconferences work better when you get into a more involved exchange of information). If you'd like to do that; you can send an email to [tt]my username here AT my username here DOT com[/tt]
Anywise; let me try to answer each section of your question as best I can with what info we have so far:
I thought javascript or java or whatever was used to create and display the shapes and moving effects of a complicated looking web page as opposed to ordinary html - but maybe I am wrong?
-JavaScript is often
involved in the pages you're describing; along with HTML (obviously), CSS (Cascading StyleSheets ... affect the way HTML is displayed, and work very well synergistically with JavaScript), Flash (Adobe proprietary animation & interactivity stuff), and some other technologies.
-JavaScript was originally intended to make web pages capable of being more
interactive, and that is still where it is most applicable, though it is also useful for many non-interactive functions, which can include timer-activated events; hiding/revealing and moving objects around a page; etc.
-Java, on the other hand, is a compiled language (not unlike vb) that is special in that the compiled binaries are cross-platform executable (i.e. no need to recompile/install the program to run on a mac, a windows box, and a unix/linux box...just send the executable over, run it, and it just works) on any machine that has a working Java Runtime Environment installed.
The page has to be automatically formatted from data in various fields of a number of database tables.
The picture filename text could be in one database and the text data in another.
-OK, this may be the hardest part for us, using JavaScript. ...since JavaScript is intended as primarily a web page interactivity engine, it has some fairly strict limits on its file handling capabilities. In most cases, these are VERY beneficial to you, as you would NOT want someone to be able to design a web page that automatically uploaded your CC info, planted a virus on your system, then deleted some random files on your HDD, simply by your having loaded the page! For our purposes here, though, it will make things slightly more difficult for us, as we'll need to redo your databases as JavaScript *.js files in order to be able to read & utilize them to affect the rendering of our web pages.
-This is where I'm not sure if you'll end up wanting to go with a "pure" JavaScript (client-side processing) approach; or maybe use some server-side scripting to help the process along (i.e. having your database server generate the web pages from the databases, then the client/kiosk computers simply have to request the pages at appropriate times). Either method can accomplish what you're asking for, the primary differences are in computer processor loading (if there are a LOT of kiosk terminals, the server-side loading could become a bottleneck), and where you want to spend your programming energy (server-side HTML generation may be a more complicated original program, while JavaScript requires stricter formatting of the database files).
The various changing text would be sent at intervals (or called up by the client) and the different pictures changed say every 10 seconds like a slideshow while other movie windows might run for 15 minutes and repeat.
-This should be the easiest part for us. It can either be done using a JavaScript [tt]onLoad[/tt] event that starts a timer; or a [tt]<meta refresh="...">[/tt] tag. Either way, refreshing/redirecting a page at any specified interval is a fairly trivial task
In the present system I use a server TCPIP winsock and send the data from the server to a client winsock. The dataarrival sub of this simply refreshes the screen with the new data when it receives the complete data block. How do I do it with HTML (or java) using only the browser? Is there some sort of javascript I can run on computer startup?
-Actually, this could be another easy(est) part. Simply set each kiosk system to open the browser on system startup (i.e. in most Windows machines, you can place a link to the browser in the "Start" directory, or add a line to the [tt]autoexec.bat[/tt] file that opens the browser); set the browser to open in fullscreen mode; then set the homepage of the browser to point to a static page (or script) that can then redirect to whatever information should be being displayed at the time it's retrieved (i.e. "static" meaning the page FILENAME never changes, but the server automatically changes the contents to point the kiosk system's browser to wherever it needs to go in order to "catch up").
Sorry for the long post, but it's quite a bit of information to try to communicate in a forum post.
I hope this helps;
robherc
