Currently we have a document management system that is implemented as a windows desktop application.
We want to convert it to web application using ASP.NET; however we are facing a major problem.
The application depends heavily on COM automation specially to work with Microsoft Office documents and AutoCad drawings in order to insert the generated document number in the documents.
What are the possible solutions to achieve the same functionality using web application?
ActiveX is not supported in modern browsers.
COM automation in the server is not a good idea! or is it?
3rd party tools do not support all the required file formats e.g (word , excel , project, visio, autocad .. etc).
Your help is appreciated.
Thank you.
Emad-Eddin
Just use COM automation on the Server.
It is not ideal and if you were designing from scratch you probably wouldn't do it, but for this kind of situation it is fine.
However I think you should actively plan to remove reliance on COM interfacing with server applications on your server as it will cause you more trouble in the future.
Related
I want to build a custom document management web application that ties in with sharepoint for the actual document versioning and storage. I'm hoping for something like a sharepoint widget that I can plug into my web application that would allow me to tie in with sharepoint and download documents, make edits to them, and upload them back to sharepoint, with sharepoint handling all of the versioning and storage.
Basically I'm looking for a sharepoint API.
If WSS is the answer to this, are there licensing issues that I need to consider?
Thanks.
The best way forward is probably to use SharePoint's web services as that way your application can run on a server that doesn't have SharePoint installed.
Regarding Licensing, as long as you are licensed for Windows Server then WSS is free. However, depending on what database you use you may need to make sure that your users are licensed for SQL Server. Have a look at these links:
SharePoint Connections
Technet
Eggheadcafe
Wouldn't it be easier to do some development to customize SharePoint to your needs instead of just using it as a backend?
If it's SharePoint 2007 you're talking about, then on the server side you have the SharePoint API (Microsoft.SharePoint.dll) and on the client side, SP provides web services for manipulating lists, libraries, users and most other things you might need.
As Jeremy said, getting data to and from SharePoint through the Web Services, requires you to write CAML queries, but it's made easier by the help of tools such as this free CamlQueryBuilder
There's loads of documentation on both the API and the web services online.
If you're planning on using SharePoint 2010, all this will be quite easier, as more options are available for developers, e.g. API for the client side as well as the server side. Also new in 2010 is LINQ for SharePoint, which IMO really rocks!
Sharepoint is accessible with CAML Queries in that you can create, modify, and delete any object in Sharepoint with this.
You could create your own front end and just communicate to sharepoint.
As far as licensing, WSS comes with any Windows Server OS, so your client would just buy a license to the OS and be fine.
We have a fairly large system involving multiple applications running on Windows, written in .NET. These include a number of web applications using ASP.NET.
We have a number of unrelated web applications written in LAMP - Linux/Apache/MySQL/Php.
The greatest advantage we've seen in ASP.NET is the ease with which code can be shared between web applications, win-form applications, windows console applications, and windows services. We have signficant code in .NET assemblies that are shared across all of these environments.
Apache/Php has some significant advantages over ASP.NET as a web programming environment, but if there is anything in it that is equivalent to .NET when it comes to integrating code that is shared across non-web applications, I'm unaware of it.
So I'm asking. Are there any technologies that provide the same sort of easy and seamless integration of shared code modules between Apache/Php and non-web applications?
The only environment with most of what you are asking for is Java.
Take the same code, stick it in a swing app, servlet, applet, heck even throw it in a mobile device, it'll work. JDBC should be a nice abstraction over most databases, so you're clear in that area.
Other than that, requesting something similar over the LAMP stack is something I believe does not exist at the moment.
Not that I know of, but I do know that Mono has a runtime module that can be plugged into Apache, effectively running an ASP.NET application under it. See here on the blog on how to do this.
Edit: As per Robert's comment, the link on that blog is broken! Here's the official link to sourceforge.net. Sorry!
Hope this helps,
Best regards,
Tom.
I know Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a development toolkit for building and optimizing complex browser-based applications. GWT is used by many products at Google, including Google Wave and Google AdWords. It's open source, completely free, and used by thousands of developers around the world.
It can be integrated in java based web applications....
Is there any suitable replacement of GWT for asp.net web application?
If so,what is it?
GWT is platform agnostic. It can be easily integrated with any web application, not just Java. You just tell it to inject widgets into elements on the host page - the host page could be static HTML.
The built in RPC mechanism makes it easy to do RPC with a Java on the server side, but you can certainly use JSON or XML to exchange data with your server. It's a little more work, but not impossible. Look up 'overlay types' - these make working with JSON data extremely easy.
Consider SmartGWT. It has a built-in REST connector that is easy to connect to REST services on the .NET platform, which Visual Studio can help you generate.
On the .NET platform, the free open source (LGPL) edition is all you need. If you need commercial license terms, those are available too.
Take a look at Script#, but I'm not sure if it's still in development. "Essentially the Script# compiler is a C# compiler that generates Javascript instead of IL."
http://www.nikhilk.net/Entry.aspx?id=121
If you're just looking to hook up an ASP.net web application with GWT, try
GWT and .NET
I'm trying to start on a new project to help enrich my asp.net knowledge, since I'm not completely satisfied with what my class is teaching me. From my (very little) experience with Rails, I recall every application containing its own development web server. Say I were trying to create a local-only application, but I want it to run in a web browser (Therefore ASP.Net). Are there any options in terms of being able to distribute an application and have it launch its own, or just not require IIS/VS/Apache-mono?
You may want to look into aspNETserve. It sounds like it would fit your needs. I haven't worked on it recently, so it probably has some rough edges.
On the plus side its all open source, and if you are just getting started with ASP.NET it would be a real eye opener on how the internals of the ASP.NET lifecycle operate.
The simple answer is that you need a web server to run the application. It cannot run without one.
If we're talking demo purposes or you don't require that many features of a web server there are redistributable web-servers that you can include with your setup package.
Like Alex mentioned the most popular one seems to be Cassini.
I'm assuming that you want to run the site on the same machine you are developing it on.
Visual Studio 2005 and up allows you to run the site from VS itself if you want to view it locally on your development machine.
To my understanding Visual Web Developer allows you to do the same as well.
Visual Web Developer
You can use the cassini web server. Please note that those are different redistributable:
http://www.asp.net/Downloads/archived/cassini/
http://ultidev.com/products/Cassini/
I'm not really certain why you would want to develop a web application (with all the difficulties it entails, due to the fact that you are dealing with a stateless connection to an unknown client machine), but then run the entire thing on the client machine.
Surely it makes more sense to develop a WinForms application?
Follow this guide to setup IIS on your PC to run ASP.NET apps:
http://www.geekpedia.com/tutorial25_Setting-up-your-ASPNET-server-IIS.html
I have a need to explore VOIP integration into a .Net application. It would be incredibly helpful if the toolset was usable via ASP.Net (version 2.0 or higher), and provided the developer the option to allow interaction on the client either embedded within the web browser or external to the client web browser. It should be compatible at a minimum with Internet Explorer, but would be better if browser independence were an option.
I don't really understand your question -- what are you trying to DO with VoIP? Since you mentioned ASP.NET I'm guessing you mean some kind of server app? If you explain more about what you want to do, we can give you better advice.
You could check out Microsoft's Speech stuff: http://www.microsoft.com/speech/speech2007/default.mspx. As I understand it, Speech Server was moved into being part of OCS. I remember that it supported using .NET 3.0's Workflow Foundation as well as some multi-modal stuff with ASP.NET.
FreeSWITCH is a flexible VoIP system that works for both large-scale server implementations as well as embedded scenarios (say as an ActiveX softphone). There is full .NET and Mono support via mod_managed. (This allows you to create voice applications in FreeSWITCH using any .NET language.) There's also an XML-based API that allows you to send and receive events to control a remote FS server. You could use this from ASP.NET. FreeSWITCH is very active in #freeswitch#irc.freenode.net so you can get a lot of advice there.