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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T00:32:14+00:00

I am going to implement an easy-to-use and eye-catching graphical user interface for management

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I am going to implement an easy-to-use and eye-catching graphical user interface for management and configuration of an ethernet switch which has a flash (of just 16 MB) mounted in it, which will have an embedded linux, some specialized softwares, CLI and GUI.

I think, I should go for a web-based graphical user interface so that an admin can access it using the switch’s IP. At client side I am thinking of using HTML5 or HTML4 with Javascript as GUI developed in Flex will probably take much more flash space.

However, I don’t have a clear idea of server side technology to be used. Should I go for mini-apache for embedded systems with PHP (as I am familiar with Apache+PHP on x86 systems)? or is there a better alternative?

Also, should I go for a MVC type of architecture? Are there some great MVC frameworks developed for embedded systems?

Update:
Basically, I only need to provide a GUI on top of a CLI running on switch. Basic workflow of the application will be something like:

  1. User access GUI through a web interface
  2. User performs an action on GUI
  3. A CLI command corresponding to the action performed is sent to the
    server (running on switch)
  4. Server runs the CLI command on the switch
  5. Server returns result of the command back to GUI
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You could use an HTTP server library like Onion (in C), GNU libmicrohttpd (in C), or Wt (in C++) to make your own specialized HTTP server (embedded inside your device).

    You could also use Ocsigen in Ocaml for the same purpose.

    I don’t think that embarking a complete HTTP server (apache, or perhaps better lighttpd) with a PHP stack makes real sense on an embedded device (the code stack would be much bigger). On such a device the performance does not matter much (you won’t get thousands of HTTP requests per second), but the code space (and process space, ie memory consumption) is quite important. (And the specialized web server solution I am suggesting uses only compiled code, which would run faster than interpreted PHP).

    If you insist on having a lighttpd or apache web server in your device -which I believe is wrong-, you could make your application a FastCGI application (and code it in C, C++, Ocaml, …).

    As Simon Richter commented, you could consider making it (also) an SNMP service.

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