I am designing a web app that has some information that needs to be transferred to a client side (non-browser) application (i.e. Outlook). Assuming the client side app has an API of some sort, I need for the web app to trigger the client side (based on a user clicking a link) to get the information and transfer it into the client app through it's API.
My first thought would be to write an ActiveX control that I can pass a secure code to that then uses that information to talk back to the web app through a web service I create and then the ActiveX control can implement the interface into the client side app (i.e. Outlook). Based on what I have read, this is doable with ActiveX.
My problem is that ActiveX won't work in Mozilla browsers or Chrome which poses a real problem as I need this to be multi-platform. I've read about NPAPI which is supposedly the equivelent native technology. I also read about plug-ins for Firefox and Chrome that supposedly support ActiveX, but they aren't native. I need to have native out of the box support so that users don't have to do anything special, just click and run. So here are my questions:
1) Is ActiveX my only option for IE?
2) Do I need to develop ActiveX and NPAPI to support all clients?
3) Is there a better way to do this that I am not aware of? I am open to other technologies since the focus is on a seamless user experience.
Thanks for any insight!
Best Answer
If I understand your requirement correctly, I don't think anything is going to be seamless. You require some kind of module to be downloaded onto the client machine that will have access to the their local system resources. Any decent browser is going to throw up horrified warnings to the user.