The purpose/s of this question is to discover what are some of the most reliable methods of achieving communication between existing offline software and a web application.
(Example) Scenario:
A person has written a piece of software that primarily runs "offline" on a cluster/network of local servers (accessible physically).
This piece of software is a structural mapping of the highway system and was written in a language like C++ over many years and has been well maintained.
Now, this person wants to build a web application (in a language like Ruby/Python) that is attempting to take traffic-flow data via a government API and wants to:
- Take this data and load it into to the offline software
- Use the offline software to map out better traffic flows (and other statistical analyses)
- Send this data back to the web application to be communicated via HTML5/Javascript to a client/s
Some points to be held constant:
- This is the system the client has specified and the only way
- Both the offline system and the web application will be using SQL for their databases
- The person has invested a large number of hours and maintenance that do not warrant a rewrite of the offline software
Based on the above, what are some options for achieving this?
Can this be achieved on an application and/or database layer?
Which layer would provide a structure where neither application has to be modified to function with the other application? (separation of concerns)
What is the most common (known) method for achieving such communication?