One of the requests of my project is to make a website take in measurements from a weighing module. This module currently works with a standalone app through a COM port.
What would be the possibilities to perform such a thing through a browser? Is it possible at all?
views:
66answers:
3
+3
A:
One way to do this would be to have an ActiveX control that communicates with the COM port. However, this either assumes Windows and IE or a kludgy way to run ActiveX in another browser.
Greg Hewgill
2009-01-22 09:01:16
Hmm, I was affraid of that answer ...As a web dev I worked really hard to make the website cross browser. To make it proprietary to IE now would really be a bummer.
borisCallens
2009-01-22 09:03:56
Hi Boris, you're not talking about a website though, you're talking about an application that connects to communications ports on a client machine, this involves something installed on the client machine such as an activeX control. Browsers as I'm sure you know are designed to prevent what you want.
Toby Allen
2009-01-22 09:10:20
I am indeed fully aware of that. That's why I added the last sentence to the OP. I'm not fully agreeing with the requirements for the project either (browsers are not meant for this kind of things), but as always, I try to make sure I know all the posibilities before I go back and explain the client
borisCallens
2009-01-22 09:49:42
It doesn't look like the person on the website got it running though. I'm not big on java (let be java applets), so I don't know what restrictions it has either.
borisCallens
2009-01-22 09:52:24
+1
A:
Make a small program that runs on the client computer exposing weight data over HTTP and JSON. This way your webapp is still cross browser and everything is simple and you have full control. If your webapp cannot connect to localhost to fetch data, let the user enter another address for the weight-server or have them download and install the weight-server program, this way you could have more than one client use the same scale.
svinto
2009-01-22 10:04:19
This might actually be the best solution since the whole logic already exists in the standalone app. We could maybe port it to something like that.
borisCallens
2009-01-22 10:25:41