Re: Help developing a "generic webcam" widget
Here's what I recommend - since each feed might have different conventions about where you might have to put the cache-defeating code, one might adopt some sort of substitution mechanism.
For instance, you could create a standard pattern, say "$NOW$" that is replaced by the current timestamp using a simply Actionscript trick:
url= url.split('$NOW$').join((new Date()).getTime());
Then the person would enter the url as something like:
http://my.camera.ip/someImage.php?someparameter=blah&now=$NOW$
This would handle the case where the 'now' parameter is both the only argument (requiring '?') and one of many (requiring '&').
Or, one can make some attempt to intelligently figure out by examining the URL entered to see which to use - to be save one would have to create a pretty complete URL parser.