We run a cloud-based medical software, and a very important part of the program is bridging to an imaging software straight from our website, passing information through command line arguments. We pass a patient's name and ID through a Java applet, and it will open the imaging program that is installed locally on the user's computer. There are many different imaging software vendors that we bridge to, so it isn't possible to make our own imaging software in the browser.
I was wondering what the best way is to pass in these arguments and open the program, without using the Java applet that we have. As you all may know, Google is dropping NPAPI support in Chrome, and has just recently pushed update 42 which disables Java applets by default. It is still possible to use them for now, but support will be dropped completely by September. So, what would be the best thing to replace our Java applet with?
Best Answer
Running local programs through the web browser is frowned up for most scenarios, so browsers don't really want to implement that support.
One idea I had that you could do, is create some obscure file extension, and register your client-side app to open them. Then, your web page serves up some file, in that file extension. The file would get opened by your client-side app and the file contents would tell your app what to do. Then, configure the browser to download and open those files without confirmation.