Sharing data between instances of an application

[mordjah]

Hello,

I am a beginning student of computer science, having successfully completed Stanford's online CS106a Java course.

I am developing an application for work that lets supervisors monitor various stats of research assistants conducting opinion polls when it occurred to me that if they like this application at work they will want to run it at as many as six computers. What I want to do is store overall averages of production rates, and share that data among instances of the application. I need to be able to allow all the computers running the application to adjust the averages from one place. I know that I will have to check if a given job is being monitored already so that only one instance will be modifying the scores at a time, but what is the best way to share the data allowing read/write access from multiple sources?

Any help would be appreciated. This is my self imposed Java final before I move on to 106b and c++. (and my entry into their tech department...)

Thanks,

~Mordjah

[masijade]

A database.