I guess this is something pretty common these days, but I don't see how it's done. Let's say you're running a game server, like a Counter-Strike server, or your own custum MUD server, and you want people to be able to look at a web page and see how many people are connected, the current map, etc. How's that done? How does the executable give that information back to whatever's asking for it? Does it just keep a file that it writes to occasionally that other stuff can read? Is there some kind of message passing mechanism?

The games I've delt with will just spit out a huge log file thats updated ever so often.

Its the web application (php, asp ect ect..) that reads the file and makes sence of everything.

This doesn't really help with the question...just sayin :)