For Goals 1+2, can you start with describing the physics of the problem? I can see you make a guess which lies in the centre of a range with a 10% random deviation. Then you enter that guess into a remote web-based service and you get back two values which you compare until they are equal. If they are not you make a new guess within a new range which becomes smaller and smaller. There must be some equations governing these phenomena and perhaps you can solve them to get the answer analytically rather than with iterating? I am a complete newbie when it comes to the stars.

Goal 3: I would start with the HTML (re: pulldowns etc), you probably require a form in order to sumbit user input to your back-end script. The back-end script can do the calculations and present them back to the webpage. Perhaps you can also present results by constructing an image on-the-fly via Perl (e.g. GD). I can see a bit of a problem when back-end processing takes some time to complete while the webpage says "waiting ...": timeouts, connection failures, exceeding web-host's CPU quota etc. can waste the backend processing and users retrying and clogging the system. I am not sure what a good system for that is: perhaps users submit jobs and when a job is completed an email/pdf is sent to them? Another idea is to add a database caching user requests. You may be able to save some processing this way (on the expense of setting+working a db).

bw, bliako

In reply to Re: calculating planet conjunction with mojo front end by bliako
in thread calculating planet conjunction with mojo front end by Aldebaran

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