Sorry for the cryptic title, struggling to summarise my problem in a single line…
I wish to deploy an online, hosted website to serve a series of remote terminals which will be equipped with Chip & Pin payment card readers (aka pinpads). The pinpads are driven by some software on the PC within the terminal which is written by a 3rd party. The integration methods supported by this software are either text file based or socket based with a “request” and “response” workflow.
I have successfully carried out similar integrations in the past using client side VB Script to instantiate client side COM objects which communicate via socket connection with the local 3rd party software but this approach ties me to Windows and I would prefer to keep my options open.
My web server will be Ruby On Rails based and I intend to use HTML5 and CSS3 to provide a rich experience on the payment terminals and wondered if I can use web sockets for client side communications? From what I understand, this is not what they are designed for and so I think the answer is no.
So, what are my options? Can i use client side JavaScript to carry out socket communications or is this prevented by browser security measures? From the browser’s perspective it would be communicating with a specific numbered port on “localhost”
If socket comms is not possible, can I use JavaScript to create client side text files to integrate that way?
Or am I stuck with VB script and local COM objects?
Any suggestions would be most welcome and please let me know if you need clarification on any aspect of my question.
Kind regards,
Craig.
I don’t think you can write a text file with JavaScript. And you can’t put arbitrary bytes on a socket either. I don’t completely understand you scenario. It sounds like you have Ruby sunning on a server and JavaScript and this third party pinpad thing running on a client. And you need the two client entities to be able to talk to each other. Could you have the browser communicate with your Ruby server (using one of many web technologies) and then have your Ruby server relay the data back to the pinpad socket. Or is the pinpad only a local socket?