PHP talking to hardware at client PC?

[Bill Campbell]

On Sat, Sep 09, 2006, David Bandel wrote:
>On 9/9/06, Man-wai CHANG <mwchang at i-cable.com> wrote:
>>
>> How could I make a PHP program running inside Firefox, to make a call to
>> a cash register's drawer attached to the Firefox PC? You can't do that
>> without using IE and ActiveX, can you?
>>
>
>You probably also believe M$ invented the Internet.
>
>While I would have used Perl vice PHP, you embed Javascript in the
>code sent to Firefox.
>
>Perl/PHP: run on the server and perform tasks on the server (like
>accessing the PostgreSQL server)
>Javascript:  runs on the client and performs tasks on the client (like
>opening the drawer)

I usually deal with problems like this where a web server is
running with reduced permissions by setting up an xmlrpc server
on the host that only listens on localhost, and performs a very
limited set of functions.

I wouldn't be using a PC running Windows for my POS application,
but would be running a Linux box so this is easy.

IMHO, the python xmlrpc interface is far cleaner than perl's.

Bill
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