Best way to publish Arduino sensor data to a web page?

Question

I want to read sensor information from an Arduino Uno. I already have a Java program that connects to the serial port and reads the information from the Arduino.

I want to publish this information to a web page (currently my computer is running the Apache web server). I'm not that good at web development, however I can get by.

My plan is to save the sensor data that I've read in from the Arduino to a file. I would update this file about every 1 minute. Then using some server side scripting language (i.e. PHP) read the data from the file and generate a web page showing the sensor information when the page is requested.

However, this approach doesn't seem very "elegant". Is there a better way to perform this task?

(Also, I'm only using the Arduino Uno with a USB port, I don't have an Ethernet shield.)

Answer 1

I guess it really depends on how robust you want web page to be and how centralized you want your application to be.

If you are just looking for simple raw data, you could build a simple web server into your Java application to serve the contents of the file. This would centralize everything into one application. (Instead of apache + php + java)

If you are looking for live data, you could even fire off serial commands when something like http://localhost/getData is requested and respond with live data read through the serial. (Although, I would not recommend this if several simultaneous connections are going to be made to your web server. Arduino doesn't do multithreading and serial can be slow.)

The downsides of this, of course, is that you are manually coding the HTML output. There are some HTML libraries (here and here) that may help with this though.