Question

Recently received a request to add communication to a device connected via serialport on the client’s machine through my webpage.

I’d done some googling and found that node.js with node-serialport seems to be the javascript way of doing it. However, in my case, the device is actually connected to the client’s machine, and not the server.

My question would be how do i implement node.js in this sense? Since the code is run at the client browser, is it possible for me to ’embed’ node.js on my webpage?

Or is there any other alternative for doing this? Applet and ActiveX are out of the picture though.

Thanks

UPDATES:
Had managed to convince the client to have applet loaded from the web, so we’ll be going through the applet route. Thanks all for your great info! =)

Answer 1

JavaScript in the browser only has access to the APIs provided by the browser: it lives in the browser sandbox where it (rightly) has no access to the client file system or other hardware.

This is different from node.js, which is a server implementation that has access to all sorts of other file system APIs.

To “break out” of the browser you must use some sort of browser extension.