Is there a way to do this?
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What did you mean by the program needs to update when the program does? Did you mean that the program has to update when the site does? That's not too hard. It's all about sockets.
To make your program cross-platform and simpler I would suggest using some library. For example http://www.alhem.net/Sockets/ . Here is a short plan:
- Send a request to the website.
- Extract information from the HTML code you get.
- Compare it with the old data. At this point you should check if it's worth checking if it's a new data or the same as the previous. Maybe you can just update the info on the screen - that would be simpler and make no noticeable performance difference in most cases.
If the website is yours, you could simply make a page (like /status.php) that prints only the data you need (no HTML code, unless it must be there).
"-"...and if data sent to the client is huge, you could use a script (on server) that updates some file whenever needed and the client would check the last modification timestamp before downloading data. This would reduce server traffic.
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