Returning data from mobile terminals

[vetran]

Central web service with local (on terminal) caching? Less overhead than ftp? More secure,manageable and scalable.

Could take significant advantage of compression.

[Sockpuppet]

I've been asked by Client Co to look at returning telematic data from the fleet of vehicles. A plan B for me, I only do 3 days a week. They've said if I can develop something they like they'll buy it as the current provider is a little crap.

Just wondering what they best way to do this would be. Probably update every second into a file and return this every 10 seconds to a central server.

Thinking the best way to do this would be to write the info to plain text files and return those over ftp.

This was should the vehicle go out of gprs coverage the files are still produced and uploaded incrementally.

Or would it be better to write something that could put the info in the database directly. Just thinking the overheads of FTP are pretty small but the handling of lots and lots of these text files (500 vehicles so 3000 per minute) would probably wipe out any gains that I get in not using binary encoding on the data transfer.

Sockpuppet