One of the thing that current Windows application does is that it writes out information to a hardware device via a UDP message. We are considering porting the application to web-based.
I checked Silverlight, and that doesn't allow UDP. We don't want to use ActiveX or Java Applets.
What are the other options?
Thanks.
Update - does anyone know if I can use Flash to do this?
Unless I'm mistaken, you've eliminated all your options for something like that.
There's not going to be a way for a page on a client browser to write to a UDP stream on that client machine without some form of thick client.
(I'm assuming you're talking about a device attached to the client PC rather than the Web Server)
You could always have a middleman - have some software running, listening for tcp connections that forwards the data to the udp client.
Other than that, you can only use TCP with pretty much any browser-based socket technology.
If you don't mind a "web-technology-based" solution outside of the browser, from v2.0 AIR supports UDP sockets. Which is almost like Flash supporting them, except different. (I know this isn't quite what you asked, but since plugins normally run their networking stack through the browser I think it's as close as you can get..)