This is a re-opened issue that can also be found at http://www.computing.net/programming/wwwboard/forum/7077.html. anonproxy helped out quite a bit, Great links dude! the pocket pc/pda's toward the bottom of the first url is what i've been picturing in my head. the huge listing helps compare cost and features. A+ job. :-D Next step probably is to figure out the budget for this project and then start piecing things together. I remember seeing the commercial in the past year that deals with "one-degree of seperation" for a winery. at a warehouse, a fork-lift hits a bump which destroys alot of wine. elsewhere in the business, another person scans the product and the original price comes up.. then instantly changes to show the new price after the accident. This is almost exactly what I've been picturing. Feel free to comment with anything to add. I will be checking back on my posts often. I still am looking for some more help with the project, especially the coding portion. PS. I've been recently thinking of changing the project to use chips & radio-frequency.. but that would cost alot more. However, has anyone done either setups?

"A+ job" Makes up for all those other grades in school. "This is almost exactly what I've been picturing." I think IBM has touched you. This coordination is really not a huge deal. On a small scale, it is simply one process talking to another - a client/server relationship where the roles are interchangable. What makes it a big thing is now there are (heavily) marketed standard frameworks to work in (basically Java, .Net, and a few rogues) along with commerical, object-oriented toolkits and libraries to manipulate. What it all comes down to is that you really only need to glue things together, and now you can even buy glue branded the same as your libraries, IDE, application server, etc. Also, these solutions interoperate much better than heavily modified systems. So what you have in a technical sense is a bunch of clients and servers, connected transparently somehow, which communicate in secure and standard ways. For example, consider an n-tier system (n most often equals 3 or more). One tier is your application server, one your client (which usually has a human using it) and another your database. You use all one language (let's say Java, maybe a JSP frontend for the web interface, J2EE for your server, and Oracle in the back). The client authenticates itself with the app server (you use some boxed function already supplied with the framework you bought - in fact the code is probably ripped off a template), and whatever details you want happen. Then, the client is provided the web interface. The interface provides a means to query the database. So what is new? Well, firstly this setup can scale across multiple servers. Imagine lots of clients, multiple app servers, and databases in seperate locations. Now include different web frontends (maybe not all in JSP), different databases (maybe a MySQL here and an Oracle there), several authentication schemes (for whatever legacy reason), thousands of queries/writes over a short period of the same data, and some CEO who wants a bar graph of everything when he comes into the office. In such cases, it becomes clear that you need a well-planned system. But, you may not want all that. Depends on your needs. A LAMP setup can still do quite well in many cases. RFID (I assume that is what you mean by "chips and radio frequencies") would be interesting. Again though, what are you real requirements, budget, timeline? Decide these or post them, then report back.