Of course, you can keep track of the marketplace using traditional tools??”like the
newspaper and television reports??”as well as through investment sites like Yahoo!
Finance or various online stock brokerage sites. However, if you want to accomplish a
specific, custom reporting goal, you need to write some custom code. This chapter??™s
example demonstrates how to create such a report, tracking investments with Fidelity
Investments (http://www.fidelity.com).
Writing a Small Server to Get Report Data
For this chapter??™s example, you will create a small web server to feed data to your reporting
system. This approach can be useful in several situations.
For example, if you have mixed Linux and Windows servers, often you??™ll find that
some tasks, such as controlling Component Object Model (COM) objects or communicating
with a Microsoft SQL Server, are better performed directly on the Windows system.
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C H A P T E R 9
(COM is a way for Windows applications to access the software components of other
Windows applications.
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