GUI apps on a web server using asp?

[jj2007]

What I want to do is fairly simple:

- user sends from browser request "Create a bar chart for me, using a=1, b=2, c=3"
- on the server, a Windows app creates BarChartTmp.gif
- BarChartTmp.gif is sent back to user, and displayed in his browser

Now I read here: Launching visible GUI applications on a server from ASP.NET is not something you want to do.

Elsewhere somebody wrote that CreateWindowEx will not work on a server because only commandline apps can run on a server.

I am a bloody beginner in these things and would appreciate a hint to a simple explanation...

Thanxalot, jj

[drhowarddrfine]

Well, yes.  Windows applications and code write to the video card on the system they're on and not out to the web.  Servers don't even have a way to display video that way though you can with 'nix using X-Windows which have a client/server relationship, but that's not the same type of server that serves the web.

But if all you want to do is serve up the image, then when a browser accesses your site, the server can create the page and transmit it to the browser which will display it staticly.  More can be done with it interactively with Javascript and some server side languages.

[jj2007]

the server can create the page and transmit it to the browser which will display it staticly. 

Thanks! That's exactly what I need, but if I understand correctly, it implies that CreateWindowEx (and all the other API calls, of course) works on the server. In other words: There is a GUI app running on the server, nobody will ever see it, but it is able to save its own bitmaps and send them to the user's browser. Is that feasible?

More can be done with it interactively with Javascript

js is not a problem, I wrote some 25 k from scratch an use it here, but all the graphs are already on the server, which costs a lot of space.