WebDaemon is one of a new breed of applications intended to make your website more intelligent. When combined with a scripting language such as JavaScript, your webpages can tailor their own content to suit the viewer's connection. Pretty clever idea that.

So how does it work? webDaemon is supplied as a Java Applet. The applet is embedded within an HTML page and measures the available bandwidth when the page is loaded. It then redirects the browser to another page, dependent on this speed.

Which page it redirects to and when is configurable, offering support for two or three bandwidth groups. This means that you can offer a low, medium and high version of your pages. You can see an example of this on the publisher's website at: http://www.s3solutions.co.uk/products/webdaemon.

For a simple implementation, this could be enough, but it means maintaining separate sub-sites for each bandwidth group. Where it becomes really interesting is when the page dynamically alters its own content based on cookie values.

The technologies involved are simple and you can use whatever scripting tool takes your fancy, be it Perl, PHP or JavaScript, so there's no need to learn anything new.

All in all, this is a very intelligent idea and is well implemented. It remains a new product and it will be interesting to see how it develops.