I have a question and was hoping that you could maybe help me out. I currently built an API to communicate between Catia (CAD-Application) and my browser so I can create parts/products read and write parameters etc.
One of my problems is that the only way I know to do this is via ActiveX which I really don't wanna do as it forces everyone to use IE11. Since CatiaV5 is a pretty old Software there won't be any elegant way to use it via some sort of Restful api or similar.
Since I've been working with JavaScript for a while now, did apps for phones but have no idea about browser extensions my question was this. Is it possible to write a Chrome Extension that actually uses com dlls and enables me to set up a connection to a piece of software (in this case Catia) and work with it. NPAPI plug-ins could be the solution for my problem as it looks from the information I found but it's also supposed to also being phased out.
Do you think it's still worth looking into deeper and studying on writing such an NPAPI app or is there maybe a more elegant way you can think of?
Would be happy for some ideas and suggestions. Thanks in advance and
Greetings Chris
In modern browsers the only way to do this would be using native messaging:
FireBreath2 has an abstraction for building c++ plugins which supports native messaging, though the docs are still a little sparse.