Developing a cross-platform interface for writing to hardware like PicKit OR USB over the web?

Question

I thought long and hard on weather to put this question in programmers or stack overflow. Please let me know if this is not the right place and I will post it to SO.

My friend and I am developing a display board that would need some configuration every now and then. e.g. setting contrast / backlight etc. Now this setting needs to be user controlled and we have prior experience of using PicKit2 in past. The way we programmed it was with use of command line / binaries available for both linux and windows. A front end would get the user input and then write to the pickit2 using these command line interfaces.

Our target is to try and achieve this through a web interface. Now we want to discuss with the community if there is a real possibility of developing such a cross platform interface? As a backup option we are thinking of developing native application for all needed platform and using pickit2 with command line.

Ideal way would be to just have the USB HID to do this. I looked into java USB libraries and ActiveX but nothing promising. Similar discussions around this topic are quiet old on StackOverflow so I thought I will ask this community to shed some light on possibility and limitations.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3503244/controlling-a-usb-device-from-a-web-application https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2219378/control-a-users-usb-device-via-a-webpage-possible

Is there any option we are not thinking about? Should we be happy that pickit2 is the backup solution and start developing different native apps.

Answer 1

A front end would get the user input and then write to the pickit2 using these command line interfaces.

This is basically your answer, but You need a Web Exposed front End. That means a web-server running on the same machine as the USB Device. This way it's Server side code - Local to the USB Device controlling the hardware. (The answers in you links assumed a your web-server with the hardware local to the user )

A common example of this are web enabled security Cameras. you can watch and control the camera from web interface. Also, because the camera is it's own device, the manufactures installed a lite wight web-server directly in cameras Firmware, so only a bit of router configuration is needed to be up and running. (Embedding the webserver in the firmware resolves all cross platform issues, there is only one Platform!)