With the world the way that it’s going now, everyone is moving to different platforms. You got people using laptops, you got people using tablets, you got people using smartphones. A lot of people are trying to solve the problem of being browser dependent, trying to be browser agnostic, trying to be device agnostic, open source agnostic. Really, people are running all sorts of different platforms and a lot of what has been developed in the world over the past 15, 10 years, is that people have written things for very specific platforms because that’s the majority of what has existed up until more recently.
Most people, now, are running Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, whatever their company allows them to run on an info sec environment. To stay secure, to get the most updates, people don’t want to stay on Edge, or Internet Explorer, going forward because Microsoft can’t keep up with the security updates. Microsoft is also moving Edge to Google Chrome platform. So really everyone needs to start getting support for Google Chrome, and Firefox environments to move forward.
So a lot of applications were written using Activex controls, Java Applets, things embedded in the browser plug-ins to allow the browser to work directly with the PC. To interface with peripherals, and hardware, and to be able to have that desktop app experience in the web. Now that’s not necessary anymore, a lot of modern browsers, really all of them, support just about anything you need without plug-ins or applets. They have the ability to do animations, they have the ability to communicate on web sockets, they have the ability to do a lot of what was missing before.
And with all the security problems that those old plug-ins brought in, they just had to go away. So now what people need to do, and what people have been trying to do, is they are writing what is called Middleware, which Middleware, in this case, refers to a desktop, or really a local piece of software that runs, that works as an interface between that web browser and your local PC often using something like JavaScript, in order to work in a secure environment.
Without the browser itself being responsible for that. You become the middle man, you take ownership of that application on the actual PC itself. So if you wrote a Java applet that was running in the browser before, now most likely, you can move that to continue as it was, but now it’s gonna run as an actual Java Application on the desktop. What actually needs to be put in place there is a way for that to communicate with the browser itself. And modern browsers allowed you to do that in a very secure way. What we can do, is we can help you find a way to make what you’ve written already work with a modern web browser without having to make a whole lot of changes, or hopefully, any changes to your existing code base.
If you fix this problem, you can really go forward without having to worry about what your customer base is running. They can use Edge, they can use Google Chrome, they can use Firefox, they can use Apple, they can use Chromium, they can use really whatever they want as long as you develop the Middleware for that platform run.
I’m Chad, I work for South Seas Data, and we can help you bridge the gap between now and the future.