Web based scanning solution

Question

Are you guys aware of any web based scanning software? I prefer open source, if not commercial. You should be able to scan documents and upload directly onto a web server? Perhaps based on ActiveX. I would prefer Python.

Answer 1

Dynamsoft's Dynamic Web Twain does exactly what you want, though it is commercial. http://www.dynamsoft.com I did try other solutions (there was a Java based one), but they were terribly unreliable and a lot of trouble and in the end I stumped up the money and used that.

I did toy with the ideas of writing my own. The idea is that there are open source Twain Api's out there (or I could write one), but I was going to create a small service that listens on localhost and handles the interface with Twain and passes the response to a thin Javascript layer. Would not be too much work to get something basic working.

Btw I am no way affiliated with Dynamsoft.

Answer 2

I don't think that a web page can access a scanner device. Maybe it is possible to do it with an ActiveX but it may be difficult to develop in Python. More over, ActiveX will be limited to Windows platform and IE browsers. I wouldn't go this way.

As an alternative, You may be interested by pyscanning which is a multi-platform Python library to access scanner devices.

With this lib, You could develop a small desktop app, that will scan the document and push the image to the web app.

I don't know if this kind of solution can fit your needs but I would prefer this way rather than making an ActiveX.

I hope it helps

Answer 3

I don't know of an existing system like you describe, but it would have to use a browser plugin of some sort. If you wanted to you could write such a thing with FireBreath ; if you already knew how to do the scanning part FireBreath makes the browser integration part easy by abstracting both the ActiveX (IE) and NPAPI (others) layers so that you don't have to worry about them.

Some users have reported success with tying into python scripts from C++ so that more of their logic could run in C++, though that would add a dependency of python to the system. There is no way to write a browser plugin with raw python, however.