Browser-neutral way to start local process from intranet

Question

We currently have a corporate intranet built with ASP.NET and originally designed for IE. One of the purposes of the intranet is to manage file versioning and to launch programs with the current file version. This requires the intranet to start processes on the machine locally, and is done using ActiveX.

We are now reworking the intranet to be as browser-neutral as possible, but this local application launching thing has us stumped.

Can anyone suggest a browser-neutral way to start processes locally? This is strictly for internal use on a corporate LAN with computers that are authenticated on a Windows domain.

Possibilities that we've floated, in rough order of preference:

• Javascript (doubt it's possible)
• Silverlight
• Flash
• Java applet
• Scheduling a task for "now" with windows group policy (seems like a hack)
• Have a locally-running process and use IPC from a server (also sort of a hack)

Anyone have any thoughts on what is likely to work and be not a huge PITA to implement?

Answer 1

A signed Java applet is a pretty easy way to do this. Requires end-user buy-in only once, can be updated at the server side, can have near-total rights to the target machine, etc.

Alternately, you could always write a browser plug-in using the NPAPI. A bit more of a pain, actual install required, trickier programming interface, feels a bit 90's, but still possible. :-) NPAPI plug-ins are well-supported across multiple browsers.