Hostlink Commands

Dear Forum,
working with a omron cqm1h.I am exploring the possiblitly of creating a web interface using the hostlink commands .I was wondering if anyone has any links or tips on how to communicate with plc's via a serial port like how the data is parsed and what language to use(vbasic?)
any help at all would be greatly appriciated as my knowledge of plc's is quite limited
Thank you in advance
Regards
Conor Duke
p.s if anyone need the manual it is located at
www.idom.ru/files/omron/fa/manuals/plc's/w228c1-7.pdf

U can use Visual Basic easily enough but with all comm's programming it can be quite tedious creating error handlers for timeouts, lost comm's, corrupt data etc... So might i suggest that if u can get a hold of either CX-Server Lite or CX-Server OPC. Both provide the tools to incorporate Visual Basic Communications to a PLC.

Or if u insist on wirting the comm;s driver u self then may i suggest the u look at the CQM1H-SCB41 Serial Communication Board Operation Manual W365-E1-02 - look under the host link section. There is a more detailed example basic program for your persual, notjust FSC calculation.

Could u let me know how u get on, i have a similar application and the way i got the info to display on the web page and update automatically was to use frames in the design and automatically refresh the target frame page. The VB code would automatically generate the HTML file for the frame at a regular interval. The code for the frame would include...
<meta http-equiv = "refresh" content="15; url=http://www.zzz.com">
While this works, this to me seems very inefficent and any other ideas would be welcomed.