Starting local appliactaions from a web page.

Hi,

What would be a good way to start applications and open a specified file in them from a web interface. Also running command line tasks would be nice.

Note, this is not for a public web page, but an in-house system. Also, it needs to be cross platform, Linux, OS X and Windows.

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We've discussed doing the whole system as a Java application client, but I'm thinking if it could be done in PHP or Ruby on Rails, that might be quicker. The only requirement is that it needs to be able to launch process locally on the users machine.

Cheers,

Ragnar

http://www.codingforums.com/showthread.php?t=43132

I found only this one above and it seems that the scripts works only for IE.

<a href="file:///c:/windows/system32/notepad.exe">Run this</a>

I thoght this one should work, but nope (in FireFox 2). maybe is for security: imagine - you click on a link - and *bump* 'formatting drive C:'....or something else!
Or you need to use some activeX (IE again) or new MIME-module like OSA-Kit or Indiepath-thing.