title: Webpage: accessing local file of the client / Alternatives to Silverlight / Java Applets
body: <p>We have the following requirement:
  the users of our website should be able to upload data from their handheld scanners to our web site.</p>
  
  <p>The scanners are mapped to a local drive on the PC. It is pretty easy to write a .NET program and access the file from their device and send these files to a webservice.</p>
  
  <p>Our users would like to have this directly from the webpage. They hit a button, and a component (of the website) reads the data from the device and sends it to the server.</p>
  
  <p>I know that this should be possible with these technologies:
  * Java applet
  * Microsoft Silverlight 
  * writing a rich client program which sends this to our web services (the users would like to get away from that)</p>
  
  <p>Well both of them are not looking too attractive (isn't Silverlight dead anyways ?), so I would like to know if there are any other technologies which could be used to access a local file on the client from a web page ? </p>