I'm very new to Arduino but I'm basing my Final Year Project around the technology and need some guidance.
I want to create a website where people can send messages to a database on a server. This server would connect to an Arduino that is hooked up to a thermal printer and would then print the messages.
I've already sourced a thermal printer library from Adafruit that works with a thermal printer from Sparkfun that can connect to a micro controller.
What would be the best way to approach connecting the messages to the Arduino and outputting them?
Seems that you have already got somebody else's working solution that lets the Arduino print stuff to your printer.
If you want to have the data for printing submitted via a web site then you need to implement a web app that lets people submit documents and/or data to be printed (and it is up to you to define how they do that) and then send it to the Arduino via the serial port. How you encode the data over the serial port will depend on the nature of the data, which will be determined by what data format your printing library supports and what data format you are going to expect from the user. If there's any data conversion to be done, do it inside the web app.
As an aside, given that the tricky part of interfacing with the printer has been done for you and what's left for you represents a few hour's work, are you really sure this is suitable for a final year project?
I wrote " the tricky part of interfacing with the printer has been done for you" because the original post explained that this part was already handled by the Adafruit library.