Get a word cloud to read from database. Any suggestions?

Programming Questions

treffyn

Get a word cloud to read from database. Any suggestions?

in Programming Questions • 2 years ago

Hi guys,

I'm hoping to make a dynamic word cloud that updates in (as close to) real time as possible, pulling the words and sentences from a database (happy to hear your ideas about what type of database would interface best/easiest).

Basically I'm hoping to have a few simple forms that would invite people to submit sentences and words about five categories. These responses will then be stored in some sort of database that is queried every few seconds (or push if that's somehow possible) to provide the data to generate five different word clouds as live as possible to be shown on five web pages on five computers at the front of the room.

I know that wordcloud processing scripts already exist, such as www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=7042, and I'd love it if this script was able to use it, but in all cases of user submitted libraries or projects they always pull the word list from a static txt file. Is there any way to get them to auto update (if I make the text file re-generate every few seconds), or even better, hook one of these existing projects up to read off a database?

Ideally I'd also like to have a list of all the database submissions (as they come in) just cascading down the screen. But I assume it'd be best to do this with a PHP script and AJAX frontend.

Has anyone heard of anything remotely similar (even if it's not processing based), or got any great ideas or suggestions on how to make this happen?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Replies(2)

gneumatic

Re: Get a word cloud to read from database. Any suggestions?

2 years ago

Have you looked at the SQLibrary?

http://bezier.de/processing/libs/sql/

Pretty straightforward to query MySQL with this.

PhiLho

Re: Get a word cloud to read from database. Any suggestions?

2 years ago

As said. You can use MySQL, Postgresql, or other database. I don't think the exact nature of the DB is important here, as long as you can use SQL to update and query it.
Your description is OK, but your state of work is a bit... cloudy. What have you done so far, are you blocked at some coding or design step?
I believe you can do that without server back-end (beside the database itself). No need for PHP (as far as you don't expect connections from outside, otherwise there are security issues), nor for Ajax (that's for JavaScript, I don't see how it fits in the project).
Each sketch can connect to the database directly to update it. Ah, unless you want to simplify your life (?) with HTML forms, in this case the PHP/Ajax combination makes sense. But a sketch with a GUI library can do the trick, too. Unless, again, if you expect those inputting data to be connecting to a site from anywhere. That's something I couldn't guess from your description.

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