On 8/28/2015 10:25 AM, Tony wrote:
Our product makes use of a 3rd party medical device that requires a C library
for usage. We created a NPAPI plugin that wraps this C library so we can
access the device from JavaScript.
Here's where the lawyers get involved...
The medical device, **including** the software included with the device are FDA
certified. We (as an user of the device) are not allowed to provide our own software to
access the device (which we could do without much effort). We have to use the
"certified" C library.
The manufacture of the device (and its library) do not wish to share their Intellectual
Property (IP) with us so that we could create a "modern" browser extension. As
most of their customers use their product with native OS clients, not browser based
clients.
I recommend that you write this as a Firefox addon in the following way:
* construct a shim program which links the C library and communicates
with the addon on stdin/stdout
* use the addon SDK and system/child_process to launch your shim program
and communicate with it
See
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Low-Level_APIs/system_child_process
for a description of system/child_process.
I'm going to contradict Ehsan here: ctypes is a powerful-but-dangerous
API and I wouldn't recommend it unless you have no other choice. We may
decide to stop supporting it in the future.
--BDS
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