Accessing serial port from browser window

A

ashish.sadanandan

Hi,
I'm not sure whether this is the right newsgroup to post this question
in, if it isn't please accept my apologies (and I'd really appreciate
it if you could point me to the correct one).
I'm not very familiar with XML, XSLT etc. so this may sound totally
outrageous but here's what I have in mind:

The problem is creating a dynamic user interface that talks to some
hardware that my company makes. We want to get away from C++ because
having to compile it for every build is putting severe restrictions on
our setup. So a new idea is to create XML sheets (using a scripting
language that runs along with every build). All elements of the user
interface would be described in this and then, using XSLT, transformed
into XHTML so that a web browser can display it.
Now, is the following part possible at all? Communication with the
hardware is using the serial port, so there needs to be some
underlying code handling this and interfacing with the web page. It
needs to send data to the web page and from the page back to the
hardware. Is there any language (that also plays nice with browsers)
that will allow this?
Also, another requirement is for the end user to be able to create
pages laid out in any arbitrary manner, for instance have variables
which are important to them be at the top (and maybe refreshing
faster) and others in another section of the page. Can XHTML handle
this? Or would we require Ajax?

Again, I apologize if I've butchered the terminology and used names
which are completely incorrect. I'm a C programmer and very much a
novice when it comes to web pages and their associated scripting
languages.

Thanks for your help,
Ashish.
 
G

Guest

You're talking about scripting languages for browsers -- but what you
want to do involves mucking with the user's hardware, which most
scripting languages are explicitly designed to limit in order to
prevent the obvious security risks.

So the first thing you need to figure out is whether there is a
specific browser that will permit you to do this (or permit the user
to permit it), and design that code. That's pretty far outside the
scope of XML, so yes, you're in the wrong discussion.

If/when you find a way to ask a browser to do it, you can then
consider whether you want to use XML as input into this process.
 
P

Praetorian

You're talking about scripting languages for browsers -- but what you
want to do involves mucking with the user's hardware, which most
scripting languages are explicitly designed to limit in order to
prevent the obvious security risks.

So the first thing you need to figure out is whether there is a
specific browser that will permit you to do this (or permit the user
to permit it), and design that code. That's pretty far outside the
scope of XML, so yes, you're in the wrong discussion.

If/when you find a way to ask a browser to do it, you can then
consider whether you want to use XML as input into this process.

Thanks for your reply,
You're absolutely correct about the security implications of allowing
browser scripts to access hardware. Some digging around on Google
showed that there are quite a few people who want to do this sort of
thing but it's not at all straightforward. Someone suggested that
created a browser plugin (a DLL written in C++ for instance) to do the
talking to the serial port is a possible solution. Assuming that's
done, is the rest of it possible?

Thanks again,
Ashish.
 

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