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Reading from a Barcode Scanner

Posted: Thu Nov 21, 2002 10:51 am
by jellybean
I have to create a web based application which will read information from a barcode scanner and insert that info to a database.

I already have an MS Access database which already reads from the scanner, but can i incorporate this into PHP without having to re-write the code?


JellyBean

Posted: Thu Nov 21, 2002 11:23 am
by mydimension
is the client the one providing the scanner output? or is the server providing it? if its the client (which i guess it is) then each client must configure their scanner software to output to the webpage that is collecting the information. not sure what to do if its the server providing the scanner output.

Re: Reading from a Barcode Scanner

Posted: Fri Nov 22, 2002 9:52 am
by BDKR
jellybean wrote: I have to create a web based application...
I take it what you really mean is a client server application that is using the internet for communication correct?
jellybean wrote: I already have an MS Access database which already reads from the scanner, but can i incorporate this into PHP without having to re-write the code?
JellyBean
This is extremely vauge. First off, are you sure that Access is reading and processing the
information from this scanner, or is information simply being dumped into Access by "some other process"?

Now you could take the db schema from access and convert it to something that would work with another database, but as far as the scanner itself, I'm willing to bet that there is allready something that's kicking out data from the scanner and your app just has to know how to deal with what's passed off to it.

But we really don't know becuase we don't have enough info!

I will say this. It sounds like this app doesn't need to be a webpage. Just a transaction server of sorts. Now you could use PHP and webpages to do this, but it's not going to scale as well as a dedicated app that listens on it's own port and responds back by itself, as opposed to Apache, which is an additional layer in the process.
You could use PHP and create a server that will run as a daemon for example and process requests as they come in. The good thing about this approach is that there is just one connection between your server and db, as opposed to continued opening and closing using the web approach. There is a lot of overhead in creating the connection.

Now the drawback to using PHP in this way is that being interpreted, it's not going to scale as well as a compiled language like C, Objective C.

Just some things to think about.

Cheers,
BDKR