I need to write an app that allows any number of web clients to increment and decrement a number. This, along with identifying info, gets sent to and stored on a server. Concurrently, another app watches all updates from the clients and visualizes that data on another webpage.
This kind of problem is new to me, so I'm trying to figure out a decent way to do this, but also want one that isn't overkill. It looks like using client-side javascript to write to server files via ajax might be a bit tricky, so I thought of node.js and a SQL database. however, given how simple this app is I'm wondering if it's overkill.
I'm probably looking at about 100 max concurrent clients. I want the data to persist so that I could revisualize a previous moment in time (or restart a crashed service w/o loosing data).
Would this be overkill? I'm really just looking for a simple approach to try.
What you propose sounds solid to me. Node.js is pretty light, and you have your choice of many databases to connect to.
100 simultaneously connected clients is actually a significant amount of traffic anyway.