I took your advice Mixture and we looked at PHP and AJAX and we are back to where we started.
However, along the way Flash has reared its head and so has Javascript. Now we are sitting around scratching our heads again.
May I have another go at defining our requirements (much simplified now)?
Any input gratefully received.
1. We want a server side script to draw shapes in a browser.
2. We want the user to be able to move and resize these shapes with the mouse (no screen redraw)
3. Most importantly we want the coordinates of the shapes stored in a database server side.
Thanks
Cron