I want Gears can support serial port access

[Monkig]

Does somebody had add this support or Google has the plan to add it in
the future, it seems Adobe AIR will add this support.

[Chris Prince]

It's not on the roadmap. What use case did you have in mind?

[Douglas Sims]

I'm trying to solve a problem now which I suspect is similar to
monkig's. I hadn't really considered Gears as a part of the solution
to this, but as I think about it, perhaps it could be. I'll throw out
some use cases we're looking at

- We would like to be able to control some specialized printers
through a web browser. These include receipt and label printers. In
some cases there may be more than one printer attached to a computer.
- We would like the content of the web page to be able to choose (or
at least suggest) which printer to use.
- It would be nice to bypass the normal printer dialog box which
the browser opens
- Normal printer drivers (Windows, CUPS, etc.) are very page-oriented
and don't work so well with continuous-form printers

- We would like to be able to control various and in some cases custom
USB devices through a browser.

- We would like to be able to control a scanner from within a web
page. Flash supports TWAIN but as well as I can tell, only cameras
and not scanners. Java applets can talk to scanners but Java applets
are not my favourite things to work with.

We can accomplish some of these things by installing programs directly
on the computer and configuring mime types in the browser to call them
but I think that might be difficult and clunky, especially with wide
deployment.

Perhaps another way of looking at this is just as a USB<->HTTP bridge.

Do you think Gears might venture into this area? Has anyone else
considered similar problems?

[Chris Prince]

I agree this could be an interesting area. We don't have plans to
implement serial or USB support right now, but we may be open to a
contribution.

A couple things to keep in mind:
- Since JS doesn't really support binary data, what interface would be exposed?
- Any Gears API needs to work consistently across platforms --
including on platforms that don't have serial or USB. (This might
just mean there needs to be an 'open' call that can fail.)

[Monkig]

We are develop some application for iron works, in this case, some
quality inspection equipment attach to computer, and we should get the
quality inspection result from the equipment via serial port. Now we
develop this application use .net, but other management application
are browse based and developed in java, we want all application
develop at the same platform, so we look for some solution that can
take full advantage of our team's browse based application develop
skill, and can access serial port, has the ability of local storage,
auto update. We find Adobe AIR and Google Gears meet our requirement
but all less serial port access support. Or has some other solution
can fit all our need?

[Ben Lisbakken]

Hey Monkig --

Sorry, there is no support for serial ports and it's not on our roadmap of things to do.  Also, I don't know of any other solutions.  However, as Gears is an open source project, we are completely open to anyone contributing such a module.

Sincerely,
Ben

[Alex Rudnick]

Monkig :)

One thing you could maybe do -- put the part of the application that
wants to talk to the serial port into a signed Java applet. (this
would be easiest to do if you have a fair degree of control over the
client computers -- you'll have to make sure they'll accept your
signed applets).

If I recall correctly, there's Java support for accessing serial ports
(you may have to search around to find a package that does this), and
a few ways to send messages back and forth from Javascript code to
Java applets.

It'll be sort of a hack, but I think it could be done! A few years
ago, I made a page that accessed files on a digital camera via this
sort of trick.

[Monkig]

Thanks to everyone!

Hello Alex, the client application not only need to access serial
port, but also need to run offline, so applet seems not fit in us, but
it doesn't matter, java web start can do this.

On the other hand, we want to take advantage of our team's browse
based application develop skill(now we use Ext), so we don't want to
use Swing, .net win form etc. We have a solution similar to Google
Desktop Search's approach, we deploy a small web server(jetty) on the
client, in this way, we can obtain all our needs, serial port access,
local storage access and can work offline, the only thing need to
resolve is auto update, but tomcat's farm web deployer looks suitable.
it sould be done, but looks a bit complex, that's why we want Adobe
AIR or Google Gears can support serial port access.