I am just working on a project where I want to visualize some devices, which have some input- and output-pins. Currently I got all data and attributes of a device from a MariaDB (MySQL) with the help of a PHP-script (output via the var_dump-command).
Every device is an object of my device-class, which has some sub-classes. Now I want to visualize every device with its pins, temperature and additional data on a website and I don't know what's the best way to go on from here.
The website should be dynamically, so that a click on a pin opens a popup with some information. The website-content should refresh every 1-5 seconds and should have a modern design. Additional I want to generate some graphs and statistics and I don't know if I could solve this with PHP.
Should I do this directly in my PHP-script or should I use JavaScript/jQuery in combination with a JSON-File (MySQL -> PHP -> JSON -> JavaScript/HTML?).
Because I don't have much experience with JavaScript/jQuery and only have about five weeks left for the project, a rather simple solution would be the best. I looked a little into jQuery and mootools but it is hard to tell which of them (or maybe another solution?) is suited for beginners.
I hope you can push me in the right direction.
If you have to "refresh" your printed data on a few-seconds basis I would go for an asyncronous development, so that you won't have to refresh your pages to get the updated data.
And I would pick jQuery for the ajax calls, since it is easy and there is a lot of documentation online.