Two way communication using AJAX from an HTML page to a C++ application running in same server

Question

Is it possible to communicate from a web browser(Loaded an HTM page from server) to an application running in the same server using AJAX . Need to send the request from browser using a button click and update the page with responses received from one another application running in the same server machine?

I am using HTML pages to create website and not using any PHP or ASP like server side scripting. In server machine data are manipulated using a C++ application.

Answer 1

I think you can use any sort of Javascript functions to do that. But you might need to use jQuery or similar frameworks to make your live easier. You might need to search for "Comet Programming" to know exactly how to do 2-way communication between client and server

Updated:
Well, this kind of stuff requires you to read a lot (if you have not already known). Basically, what you need is a server that can do long-polling (or eventsource, websockets). There are many open-source ones that might help you to get started. I can list a several good ones here. There are a lot more
http://www.ape-project.org/
http://cometd.org/
http://socket.io/
http://code.google.com/p/erlycomet/
http://faye.jcoglan.com/

So after you have the comet server up and running you will need to setup the client side (probably Javascript). For those listed projects, most of them come with the client side code to interact with the server (Except for erlycomet). Therefore, you can just use the examples provided and run a quick prototype. If you want to use your raspberry pi, you can use nodejs which provide a lot of ease for dealing with real-time communication (socket.io, faye). And lately, http://www.meteor.com/

Answer 2

I would think of the problem this way: you want to provide a web front end to an existing c++ application. To achieve this you need to think about how your web server communicates with your c++ application. Communication between the browser and web server can be thought of as a separate problem - as you say AJAX calls can be used, or maybe have a look at websockets .

Once you have your request in the web server you need to communicate it to the C++ application (and/or visa versa). This can be done a number of ways, eg sockets or RPC. I found this question here which has some good advice.