You'll have to forgive my ignorance as to the basics of integrating the different server/web languages, being self taught there are just some things I haven't even taken a peak at yet.

Basically I've cobbled together a sketch that will login to a gmail account, download any new mail, parse the attachments, and then do what I like with them.  It was created at first to collect gps data I'm sending as a .gpx attachment from my iPhone (the GPS app is MotionX), and then to graph each new track and save off a revised image which would be displayed on my blog.  At first I was hoping to sit the java applet on my hosting and trigger it with each email.  That seemed a stretch so I was going to setup a cron job on the server to cause the sketch to sweep my GPS drop email every hour or so looking for new tracks.

My issue is, I'm not sure if I can create a java applet that can be executed on a server without being actually loaded into a browser.  The sketch draws no window, so it doesn't need to do anything but run.  A friend just suggested I export it as a linux app instead of a java applet and then sit that on the server.   It sounds like a good idea and that is where I'm headed, but any input from someone more knowledgeable is always appreciated.

I'll clean up the code on the email reader/write sketch and post it soon, its basically this code:

http://www.shiffman.net/2007/11/13/e-mail-processing/

modified to check to see if there is an email attachment and then to parse it and save it off (so far its designed to read xml only)

Thanks,
Duncan