Interfacing with hardware via a webpage

I have a project where I need to access a specialized scanner via a webpage (no TWAIN). As far as I know, the only technology that would let me access arbitrary client hardware from a webpage is ActiveX. Is there any other technolo开发者_如何转开发gy I am missing?

It can be possible via java applet too.

Any server side application should be able to do it. Write an interface and do all the commands on the server side, passing any output back to the browser.

I've worked with several such systems recently and wrote all of them using FireBreath. To be clear, FireBreath will be an ActiveX control on IE, but it is also a NPAPI plugin that works on other web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. FireBreath is also cross-platform, so it can be used to write plugins that will work on Mac and/or linux in addition.

You would need use C++, but if you want to do hardware integration your choices are most likely a plugin or java; I don't know what limitations you would have with a java applet, but it would of course require having Java installed. FireBreath plugins have to be installed as well, however, so that could be a tradeoff.