I want to track a few hundred, maybe a few thousand people in real time.

Let's say that the hardware aspects are sorted out and I can get the data into a database.

Now, I want to get it out and show it, in real-time.

Weeeell ... "real-enough" time. Let's say that I want to draw a floorplan of a building and plot everyone every 1 to 5 seconds.

(I might want to show only certain "kinds" of people at the click of a button; I will need datamining, etc, but let's stick with the worse case scenario).

I am comfortable enough with PHP, though not this sort of thing. I personally would be happier with a windows app coded in Delphi, but the trend seems to be to make everything browser based.

So, the question, I guess is whether a browser can handle this and whether there are compelling arguments for a windows-based or browser-based solution.

If browser-based can handle this (displaying a few thousand data-points a second), and there are no overwhelming arguments for windows then I guess I will go for browser-based and learn a few new tricks. The obvious advantage being that I could also re-use a large part of my code for (vehicle) tracking on Google maps.