Ido Millet of Millet Software has posted an interesting demo on his site. It is a web dashboard that is automatically refreshed from live data. What makes it unique is that it doesn’t require an application running on the server. The update work is all done using Visual Cut on a local machine.

At the core of the process there are two reports which are scheduled to be run and exported to HTML. One provides the main page while the other is burst to provide the drill-down pages. After the export there are some Visual Cut commands that perform some ‘replace’ operations and tweak the files. The modified files are then uploaded automatically to the web server, via SFTP.

He combines all this with some clever iFrames and adds web folder passwords deployed using the htaccess file. It provides an excellent example of what can be done using relatively simple and inexpensive tools.

The  demo login UID/Password are both “demo”