Question

I used ActiveX to communicate my web app and printer using C# and asp.net.

How do I achieve this in Java?

How does Java Communicate with devices?

Let say I want to develop a parking system using Java EE technology (Spring, Hibernate).

How do I make my app communicates with the car entry or exit post?

Any advice or any recommended links to start up reading is highly appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

There are more that a few alternatives for this scenario, and some of them I already mentioned here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13762984/sending-text-from-one-computer-to-another-over-the-internet/13764357#13764357

But to resume, what I would do is build a web app that exposes a REST services and call it from all the devices I want, this is by far the best option in my opinion as it is easily extensible, flexible and scalable and also pretty well documented.

For the web app I would recommend something like jersey or RESTEasy and for the web client something like http client from apache.

Useful links:

REST: http://www.vogella.com/articles/REST/article.html
http client: http://www.vogella.com/articles/ApacheHttpClient/article.html

Hope this helps.