I have started a similar project for similar reasons. At the time I started, I was looking at Google Web Toolkit (compiles Java code into JavaScript) and did some searched on Google for Game of Life and found that the top results where not so very impressing. I thought I could do something better with GWT with the additional benefit that no Java plug-in would be necessary.

The result can be found on:
http://www.conwaysgameoflife.net

I also plan to add a pattern archive and maybe possibility to save patterns. I would like to spend more time on it but to get that time is a problem for me. I will probably make it open source soon so other people can add futures to it.

And I’ll add links to your wiki as your applet do.

As for the accessing the pattern database itself, you could have your program access the following HTML file, which auto-updates itself on my server:

http://www.conwaylife.com/gollycomplete.html

Note though that the links on that page are not normal HTML links (for example, the link for the first file is “get:pattern.asp?p=101.rle”), so you will have to alter the link a bit to access the actual RLE file on my server (for example, the correct link would be “http://www.conwaylife.com/pattern.asp?p=101.rle”).

Alternatively, if you just want to download the entire pattern collection to have an offline version of it, here is a reasonably up-to-date .zip file of it:

http://www.conwaylife.com/forums/download/file.php?id=32

All the best!

(Simple string with names will be enough).
And can you tell me how often new patterns are added to database ? (To avoid querying database every start looking for new ones).