Hello. We have a web application. There are physical devices that we need to be able to communicate with, and we have access to all of our clients computers to install whatever software we need. Now, for the question: Is there a way to make this browser-agnostic? As in, not requiring ActiveX controls?

One of my ideas was to install a custom made webserver on each client and then have javascript on our webpage that communicates with that webserver. This could be done by the same way that http://earlz.biz.tm javascript can access subdomains assigned to 127.0.0.1 such as http://loopback.earlz.biz.tm The problem with this of course is that the client's custom made webserver would be forced to run on port 80(which will have conflicts at least sometimes), or we would have to use a nonstandard port for our web application, which is quite undesirable.

Does anyone else have ideas on how to do this?