Application that connects to a website/db (such as ebay toolbar)
 

Hey all,

I am designing a website using php and mysql. I want to design an application that runs minimised in the windows icon tray that will contact my website/database and provide information to the user about their account (such as the ebay toolbar does).

I am wondering, what would be the best language to develop this application in? Visual basic/java? anyone with suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Also, would anyone know if this task would be hard? Any tutorials out there?

Thanks.

What exactly does "provide information to the user about their account" mean?

I would go with something along the lines of Visual Basic (.NET), C# or Java.

I'd lean moreso towards a C# web service, or the PHP/MySQL approach.

You can use basically any programming language to do this in. All you need is one with access to the win32api (you wanted a tray icon), Graphical User Interface (I assume this is necessary) and socket connections (to access a private page on your server). It could be done quite quickly in something like Visual Basic, but practically any language should suffice.

Wouldn't nessacarily need a private page. Depending on what you want to do, you could just connect to the db and display the info. I'd recommend C# because I use it, and I love it. But as Sane said, you can use almost any langauge. I'd say go with a .Net one though.

Thanks for the input guys. Will look into visual and c.

Well I just say a private page because (IMO) that's always the most straight forward and simple technique to set up. You would need PHP or something to do this in though.