PHP and digital ink

pikachu

Hi,

Does anyone have any pointers on how one would incorporate digital ink on a tablet PC using PHP? I can't find anything via Google.

The idea is a web-based app where the forms are rendered to the tablets (XP Tablet Edition) via PHP and I'm just wondering if it's possible to incorporate digital ink into the web pages such that a user can write something and it gets uploaded into the database (among all the text boxes, radio buttons etc that you'd normally have).

I'm hoping you can do this with PHP and I don't have to go all Microsofty to get it to work.

Many thanks,
David

konsu

i know nothing about digital ink, i do not even know what it is ; -), but you seemed to imply that Microsoft already offers technologies that make it possible. would you tell me what are these? maybe there is an open source analog?

LoganK

The library that handles digital ink on XP tablet edition is a Windows DLL file which is incompatible with PHP. Sorry.

Edit:

However, version of Visual Basic back to v.5 can utilize that library, if you don't mind building a VB app.

konsu

so, digital ink is a client side technology. right? how the server side might depend on it? what makes it necessary to go all microsofty on the server side? is there a special protocol that the digital ink client uses to communicate with the server? something else?

LoganK

Digital ink is what's built into the Table PC OS. There is no client-side vs. server-side technology for it - it can't be used over the internet. But, you can build a Visual Basic app that hooks into the library and sends data over a network. But again, it's not a webpage. So, no special protocol. Sorry.

konsu

i see. so the answer to the original question is that it is not possible to integrate digital ink in to a web page when it is shown in a browser without a special plug in that knows how to translate data in to the form acceptable for http.

LoganK

i see. so the answer to the original question is that it is not possible to integrate digital ink in to a web page when it is shown in a browser

That is correct - the "without a special plugin" part is incorrect, there is no special plugin to allow digital ink to be shown in a webpage. Visual Basic is a programming language for applications; it builds an actual EXE file, not a plugin.

Edit:
To oversimplify - there is no way for digital ink to be shown in a webpage, and there is no plugin to do so either.

konsu

LoganK wrote:
That is correct - the "without a special plugin" part is incorrect, there is no special plugin to allow digital ink to be shown in a webpage. Visual Basic is a programming language for applications; it builds an actual EXE file, not a plugin.

Edit:
To oversimplify - there is no way for digital ink to be shown in a webpage, and there is no plugin to do so either.

right. by plugin i meant a plugin that perhaps does not exist but can be written ; -) thanks for the information about digital ink.

LoganK

konsu wrote:
right. by plugin i meant a plugin that perhaps does not exist but can be written ; -) thanks for the information about digital ink.

Well that's an interesting concept 🙂 If you accomplish it (or find some derivative thereof), by all means let me know because that would be something very useful to some people.

pikachu

I found a paper on MSDN which says it does work with PHP.

You can wrap up the ink dlls, and see them as a COM object which means you should be able to get at them from the HTML rendered by the PHP (also using JavaScript to process what's written on the client-side so you can pop it back to the server-side database).

It also suggests you can run as an ActiveX object from HTML.

Obviously much to learn here and from the responses above a bit bleeding edge for now.

LoganK

That's an interesting concept, but still what you said uses proprietary Microsoft ActiveXObjects. Those with a better browser (like Firefox) will be left in the dust. Another example of Microsoft's incompliance with standards....

If you get a chance, post that article (or a link to) here. I'd like to take a look at it.